Shifting Paradigms: Decentering the Discourse of Mass Communication Research
Mass Communication & Society, 2 (3-4):
175--183 (1999)Abstract
This essay addresses the decentering of "mass communication research" as a discursive formation by an alternative cultural discourse that challenges its dominant ideology with a return to communication as an emancipatory practice, guided by the subjective nature of theory, the centrality of human agency, and the permanent critique of social, political, and economic conditions of communication. The challenge coincides with the influence of complex modernist and postmodernist ideas related to notions of culture, ideology, and power, and the increasing relevance of the production of meaning in the study of social formations. Its success is based on the ability to reflect on the role of intellectuals vis-a-vis the instrumental rationality of an administrative or corporate discourse and to reconceptualize the relations of media, communication, and society.