Practice, Interpretation, and Meaning in Today’s Digital Media Ecosystem

Historically, scholars of journalism have concerned themselves with meaning. It is ironic, then, that much of the most influential scholarship on digital media over the past two decades has concerned itself primarily with media practices. This line of thought was inaugurated by Couldry’s call to “decenter media research from the study of media texts or production structures and to redirect it onto the study of the open-ended range of practices.” This article uses research on journalism and digital political communication as a case study through which to assess the balance of gains and losses stemming from the practice turn and propose some paths forward for future scholarship. Across this article, I argue that alternate perspectives on practice (as found, for instance, in the work of the late James W. Carey) can recenter the very valuable research on media practice through a focus on the ritualized aspects of media practice, a concern with very real media texts, and by remembering that texts are not free-floating pieces of culture but are rather embedded in historically specific mediums which are only partially reducible to practice.