I intend this book to be used by students who are taking media courses at

advanced undergraduate and taught postgraduate levels, either in the field of

media studies or else in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. My
main aim in writing it has been to provide an accessible yet challenging guide to
some ways of thinking about media and communications in modern life. From
the start, though, I ought to declare that this is not straightforwardly a book
about media theory, at least not in the conventional sense in which that term
has come to be understood today. Rather, my title, Media/Theory, should be
taken to indicate a commitment to connecting the analysis of media and
communications with selected themes in contemporary social (and, to an
extent, cultural) theory. These are themes of time and space, relationships,
meanings and experiences.
While this is primarily a book for students, I also hope, of course, that it will
be read by lecturers and researchers who, like me, are teaching media courses in
higher education. For a number of those people, my choice of themes and asso-
ciated headings on the contents pages may appear at first sight to be unusual.
As I will explain, my approach does not involve replicating the existing struc-
tures that are employed within this genre of academic writing (although see
Thompson 1995; and Silverstone 1999, for perhaps the closest relatives to the
present book). A secondary aim, then, has been to make a distinctive contribu-
tion towards our rethinking of the shape and direction of media studies, by
suggesting a revised conceptual vocabulary and framework for inquiry. There is
a cumulative narrative in what follows, so that we begin with core issues of time
and space, of cyclicity and extensionality, enabling us to move on to inti-
mately related matters of social interaction, signification and identity. Allowing
for the regular incorporation of fresh material along the way, the books story
builds from chapter to chapter.
By deciding to organise things thematically in this manner, I am departing
from previous, often highly productive, ways of telling. For example, in an
introductory guide to cultural theory and popular culture, John Storey (2001)
offers a clear and helpful tour of the isms (culturalism, structuralism and
post-structuralism, Marxisms, feminisms and postmodernism). Some of
INTRODUCTION
1
these traditions of thought get a mention in my own discussion, alongside less
obvious schools like phenomenology, ethnomethodology and conversation
analysis, yet they are not absolutely pivotal to the plot. Another approach for
teaching in the humanities and social sciences is to focus on key thinkers (for
instance, Stones 1998; Hubbard et al. 2004). Again, I believe that line of
inquiry has considerable merit. It will soon become evident that several such
theorists are identified in my commentary. The writings of sociologist Anthony
Giddens, for example, are cited at various points throughout, as is Paddy
Scannells work on communications via broadcasting. However, on this occa-
sion I have resisted the temptation to let individual academic authors, as
opposed to key ideas and themes, give an overall order to the book.
In media and cultural studies, probably the most common categories now
used in writing and teaching about media are those of production, represen-
tation and consumption. Indeed, my impression is that this has become the
standard framework for introducing media theory to students in higher educa-
tion. That conceptual division, or a version of it, is found in recent publications
by Jostein Gripsrud (2002) and Kevin Williams (2003) amongst others. They
deal with the three categories in different sequences, with Gripsrud electing to
start with audiences or consumers, before ending with industries and producers,
but their perspectives are broadly similar. A few years ago, I contributed to a
university distance-learning course that adopted a circuit of culture model of
roughly the same sort (Moores 1997), and so my sympathy for the industry/
text/audience framework is already on record. Still, I have decided not to
employ it in this book as an overarching theoretical model.
To be sure, there will be numerous occasions when practices of media
production, representation and consumption get referred to in the pages ahead.
My current view, though, is that there are certain limitations to the use of these
categories (see also Moores 2004). While they are suitable for the study of what
has been termed mass communications (radio, television, newspapers and so
on), they cannot always be applied so successfully to particular forms of elec-
tronically mediated communication conducted via telephone, including mobile
phones, and the internet. These are media that we must surely now bring within
the scope of media studies, forcing us to bridge what I would see as the
unhelpful divide between work on mass and interpersonal communications or,
for that matter, between discussions of so-called new media (Harries 2002;
Flew 2005) and older, more established modes of technologically mediated
communication. In live telephone and computer-mediated dialogue, there will
be performers and audiences of a kind, but rather than the institutionalised gap
between production and consumption found in broadcasting or print jour-
nalism, the positions of the participants are constantly shifting as they typically
do in physically co-present, face-to-face communication. It might even be
appropriate for us to conceptualise radio and television as involving a sort of
social interaction with listeners and viewers, as explored in the latter part of this
book.
I NTRODUCTI ON
2
Just two further, general points ought to be made at this preliminary stage,
before I proceed to open up the particular themes that will give a distinctive
structure to the book. The first has to do with the definition of our field of
interest. In my experience, a common misconception, certainly among students
setting out on their degrees, is the belief that media studies are simply about
studying media in isolation. They are not, or, at least, I want to argue very
strongly that they should not be. Instead, it is necessary to appreciate the
complex ways in which media of communication are bound up with wider insti-
tutional, technological and political processes in the modern world, from the
reproduction of social life on an everyday basis to the reorganisation of social
relations on a global scale. For that reason, many topics apparently unconnected
with media are discussed in the book, from home decoration practices to the
interpersonal rituals of strangers in a city street to patterns of transnational
migration and resettlement. Above all, then, my conviction is that media have
to be understood in their broad social and cultural contexts. Partly as a conse-
quence of that need for contextualisation, doing media studies can mean
coming to terms with ideas drawn from a formidable range of disciplines in the
humanities and social sciences (for instance, from history, geography, philosophy,
linguistics, anthropology, psychology and sociology). Far from being the easy
option at university, as some ill-informed critics have suggested, the analysis of
media and communications is, in actual fact, often a highly demanding activity
for students, precisely because of its interdisciplinary character.
The other general point I wish to make here is concerned with the link
between theory and research. Anybody who knows my own previous work (see,
for example, Moores 1993; 1996; 2000) may be surprised to discover that this is
a theory book, since in the past I have always insisted on the importance of
empirical investigation. However, if the present book represents something of a
change of emphasis for me, it is not the result of any fundamental change of
heart. I remain firmly committed to the empirical, as well as the theoretical,
dimension of media inquiry. Indeed, there are many references in the coming
chapters to the findings of research projects, either because they serve to illustrate
conceptual issues or else because they give rise to specific ideas and concepts.
Theory requires a level of abstraction, of course, yet it is best regarded as inter-
twined with ongoing empirical research on contemporary social existence.
Having spent a while explaining what this book is not, let me now start to
discuss, in a more positive vein, the key themes I have chosen, so as to prepare
the reader a little for the story that unfolds in the chapters to follow. I begin
with time and space. Writing back in the 1970s, Giddens (1979: 202) notes
that neither time nor space have been incorporated into the centre of social
theory. The principal reason, he suggests, was a problematic tendency to treat
the temporal and the spatial as external environments within which social life is
conducted, as the special concerns of historians, geographers or philosophers.
Attempting to counter this earlier tendency, he argues that timespace rela-
tions should be seen as an in-built and fundamental feature of social
I NTRODUCTI ON
3
interaction. They are, in his view, integral to the organisation of human societies
rather than backgrounds to them, and therefore deserve to be at the very core
of our thinking about the conduct of social life (see also Giddens 1981).
Today, by the 2000s, time and space have become absolutely central themes
for social theorists, while divisions between academic disciplines in the humani-
ties and social sciences are increasingly blurred, and I believe that these themes
should be at the core of our efforts to theorise the role of media in modern
societies. Of course, it is not my intention to imply here that Giddens is
somehow single-handedly responsible for such a major shift in thinking, but his
own writings do contain valuable insights into timespace relations, which will
be considered over the coming pages. Other social theorists cited in the first
part of the book include Barbara Adam, Manuel Castells, David Harvey,
Doreen Massey and John Urry. Although the focus of their attention is not on
media, all of them have interesting things to say about communication tech-
nologies and practices. In addition, I will refer to several authors whose work
does concentrate more fully on media, time and space, like Scannell, whose
name I have already mentioned in this introduction, Marshall McLuhan (an
influence on Giddens), Joshua Meyrowitz, Kay Richardson and Ulrike Meinhof,
and Roger Silverstone.
Drawing on a range of material, then, I am proposing that we need to
understand media as operating in the wider temporal and spatial arrangements
of society, but also as contributing, reciprocally, to the creation, maintenance or
transformation of social time and space. Chapters 1 and 2, on cyclicity and
extensionality respectively, both deal with this two-way connection, yet each has
a specific emphasis. Expressing it as simply as possible, one is mainly about
round-and-round movements in time-space, while the other has to do with
what might be called a reaching out, and a collapsing in, of social life in the
contemporary period. As well as explaining such movements and metaphors,
these two opening chapters raise a number of issues to be pursued in the second
part of the book, which is concerned with human relationships, meanings and
experiences in circumstances of technologically mediated communication.
If, as Giddens (1979: 3) puts it, we must grasp the timespace relations
inherent in the constitution of all social interaction, then logically the next
step, after asking about matters of media, time and space, is to consider ques-
tions of media and interaction. Chapter 3 does this, exploring at length,
without completely exhausting, the theme of changing social relationships with
others in the modern era. An important element of this change is the social
deployment of communications technology, which helps to establish interac-
tions and interaction mixes of a novel sort, involving mediated intimacies and
sociabilities. Some of the writings I review there do start to address practices of
meaning construction in peoples relationships (both face-to-face and medi-
ated), but it is only in Chapter 4 that we turn to look in detail at theories of
signification. In the field of cultural studies, in particular, the making of mean-
ings and value distinctions has been a central theme, and so my commentary on
I NTRODUCTI ON
4
media and signification will offer an overview of conceptual developments that
are mostly associated with this academic area. What becomes clear in the course
of the discussion is that I favour those approaches to signification in which
meanings are seen to be socially variable, context-specific and multi-dimensional.
Following that commentary, my focus shifts to issues of self and collective iden-
tity in Chapter 5, where I place an emphasis on the theme of experiences that
are distinctive to contemporary living. Any attempt to comprehend patterns of
social interaction and signification calls, ultimately, for our close attention to the
formations of modern subjectivity and community. Once again, though, my
preference for certain theoretical perspectives will be evident, and in discussing
media and identity I favour the notion of a reflexive or performative self,
remaining suspicious of the wholesale decentring of the subject found in struc-
turalist and poststructuralist thinking, which tends to dismiss the category of
human experience far too easily.
Among the theorists cited in the second part of the book are Roland Barthes
(known primarily as a poststructuralist, although his late work on photography
marks a radical departure from this school of thought), Pierre Bourdieu, Erving
Goffman, Arlie Hochschild and Valentin Volosinov. The three chapters in that
part will also include references to authors like Stuart Hall, Donald Horton and
Richard Wohl, John Thompson and Sherry Turkle, whose publications include
useful reflections on the dynamics of electronically mediated communication.
Whilst I am not, in every case, wholly sympathetic to their ideas, all of the
academics listed here provide highly relevant concepts for students of media and
communications.
I NTRODUCTI ON
5