Liberal Media Modernity: A Discussion on Media and Social Theory

Author: (English) Jiahham/Li Lan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: This book adopts a debatable stance, exploring and researching issues related to media through a series of discussions on the two main paradigms—media-postmodernism and information society theory. The book argues that media are significant because they have triggered a series of important issues in social and political theory since the Enlightenment. It summarizes the main research content of Professor Nicholas Jiahham on media theory. With profound thinking, deep theoretical insights, extensive research, and rigorous language, the author analyzes various debates on media and social theory from perspectives such as historical view, cultural industry view, technology, politics, producers, audiences, and content evaluation, presenting unique insights. The scope of this book covers various branches of fields such as sociology, history, political science, economics, and communication studies. The publication of the Chinese translation of this book undoubtedly benefits Chinese readers in theoretical thinking about the Western critical school's communication political economy, broadens their horizons, and provides inspiration and reference from its detailed examples and rigorous analysis. This book will be particularly beneficial for readers engaged in media and social theory research.
This book adopts a debatable stance, exploring and researching issues related to media through a series of discussions on the two main paradigms—media-postmodernism and information society theory. The book questions why media are important, as they have triggered a series of important issues in social and political theory since the Enlightenment. After continuously exploring several different series of issues raised by media, the book's focus shifts to the problem of human's unsociable sociability as described by Kant: under what conditions can autonomous, free individuals live in a viable social community; or, in other words, what is the scope and limitations related to human reason and liberation. To address this topic, the book first discusses it from a necessary historical perspective. It then examines the meaning of liberation: media as a cultural industry within the systemic world of a broad capitalist market economy; media as technology; the specialization of the production of spiritual goods; and the separation and expansion of the social distance between symbolic producers and consumers. The book then proposes opposing the ethnographic trend in current audience research, which focuses on daily life, and advocating a return to the statistical study of audiences and effects, as well as the creation of symbolic interactionism of identity through a return to the origins of commodity fetishism and Hegel's philosophy, thereby acknowledging that active audiences can actively participate in their own control.
Next, the discussion turns to how we evaluate the symbolic forms of media communication and whether such evaluation can exceed personal experience. The book points out that the evaluation of media is inevitable, and it is impossible to judge media performance solely based on subjective criteria without certain standards. After examining the debate between art sociology and aesthetics, the book discusses the ethical foundation of aesthetic judgment and, through the discourse ethics that serves as the foundation of the entire argument, proposes establishing unified standards for aesthetic judgment. The emphasis on discourse ethics further leads to a discussion on media and politics, where the argument is that the discussion on media and politics is at the core of the discussion on politics itself. The book believes that these discussions focus on the constantly shifting boundary between the public and the private. Here, the book returns to the origins of the theory of the public sphere, drawing on Rousseau's argument on the centrality of public display in democratic political practice and Kant's argument on the centrality of public reason in democratic political practice.