Liberation. Media. Modernity: A Discussion on Media and Social Theory

Author: (English) Jiahham
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 raised 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 his unique insights. The scope of this book covers various branches of disciplines such as sociology, history, political science, economics, and communication studies. Publishing the Chinese translation of this book undoubtedly benefits Chinese readers in their theoretical reflections on the Western critical school's communication political economy, broadens their horizons, and provides inspiration and references 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 because they have raised 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 social nature of humanity's unsociability as discussed by Kant: under what conditions can autonomous and free individuals live in viable social communities; or, in other words, what is the scope and limitations related to human rationality and liberation. To address this topic, the book first discusses it from a necessary historical perspective. It then examines the meaning of liberation: viewing media as a specialized industry for producing spiritual products within the systemic world of a broad capitalist market economy; viewing media as technology; 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, advocating for a return to the statistical study of audiences and effects, and supporting 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 extend beyond 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 book's 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 continuously 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.