Social Action Media Studies

Social Action Theory

The theory of social action media studies derives from a variety of constructivist philosophical and scientific traditions. As Gerard Schoening and James Anderson have noted, these traditions—which include cultural hermeneutics, phenomenology, pragmatism, and the interpretive sociologies—commonly subscribe to a view of human beings as sentient, self-reflexive agents who construct reality through their own communicative efforts. The works of Max Weber and Alfred Schutz are particularly important in elaborating, respectively, the ideas of social action and inter subjectivity. Another theme of major significance is that of the everyday world. The everyday has been treated somewhat differendy by Schutz, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and other thinkers. For media scholars, the term has come to signify the self-evident base of social knowledge that enables people to function easily in contemporary life. Not only are the media of mass communication concrete features of the everyday, but also they constandy circulate signs that audience members use simultaneously as [Page 888]knowledge and methods for interpreting the social world.

The propositions of social action media theory have been most thoroughly developed by Anderson. According to Anderson, most of human behavior is organized into routines, with a routine being a line of action invested with cultural meaning and governed by a certain grammar and syntax. (Only involuntary and unintentional behavior falls outside the scope of a routine.) For example, the familiar routines of going to work in the morning, waiting for a bus, and text messaging each exhibit a coherent expression of purpose. Several aspects of routines bear some discussion. First, routines constitute symbols—both to oneself and to others—of what is going on in a scene of social life. Once we decode the outward signs of a routine unfolding in our midst, we can participate in it by the competent expression of our own role. (Clearly, the ability to recognize a routine is unevenly distributed in society; to the technologically uninitiated, for example, the meaning of text messaging may be quite opaque.) Second, routines can be nested inside one another. Waiting for a bus can be a regularly scheduled subroutine of the broader script of going to work; similarly, the subroutine of text messaging may be inserted in a culturally appropriate manner at many points as one goes to work in the morning. Third, people always can (and do) improvise on the theme of a routine. According to Anderson, a performance is an expressive improvisation on a routine; thus, the meanings of a behavior shift when we perform it in the context of a different routine. Finally, the way one engages in meaningful action is always under the supervision, comment, and critique of others. These others are not always traditional authority figures; much more commonly, they are simply the communities to which we belong (whose codes of conduct we internalized long ago) or specific social actors in the scene whose potential or actual judgments affect our own production of appropriate performances.

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