When Is Meaning? Communication Theory, Pragmatism, and Mass Media Reception

This chapter offers an outline of a social semiotics of mass communication and defines meaning simultaneously as a social and as a discursive phenomenon. The argument draws its concepts of signs, discursive differences, and interpretive communities from the philosophical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce in order to move beyond the essentialistic notions of meaning that characterize much previous communication theory, both in the social sciences and in cultural studies. Mass-mediated signs give rise not to a transmission of entities of meaning, but to specific processes of reception that are performed by the audience acting as cultural agents or interpretive communities. As audiences engage in socially specific practices of reception, mass media come to function as institutions-to-think-with. Empirical research has served to question notions of mass media as a relatively autonomous cultural forum in which polysemic messages lend themselves to diverse audience uses and pleasures. The polysemy of audience discourses, indeed, suggests the prevalence of contradictory forms of consciousness that tend to reproduce a dominant construction of social reality. Critical social theory in a pragmatic mode, emphasizing the interested and future-oriented character of scientific analysis, can help to indicate how and to what extent audiences may make a social difference.