3 - Contemporary Sociology, Journalism and Society

Summary

Keeping in mind the current epistemic, partisan and existential division that professional journalism now operates in I shift from political theories of consensus and conflict-based democracy to sociological theories of domination, culture and actor networks and how the different approaches apply to media sociology and journalism. Contemporary theoretical currents in sociology are not merely the continuation of the main trends of thought established by the classics. Notwithstanding their differences, classics all agreed that their object of study was society. For contemporary sociology surging global information systems as well as neoliberal economic, political and social imperatives render the sense of a unified societal culture increasingly problematic. A hard cultural turn has come about to try and account for fragmentation, the multiple discourses of power, identity and difference, and recurring crises over expanding inequality, individual versus collective rights and environment. Although sociologists are still talking about society, ironically general theories are less concerned with the understanding, description, explanation or critique of society writ large than with everyday interaction across fields, spheres or networks.

This chapter compares and contrasts three competing approaches in contemporary sociology, and the orientation they bring to media sociology and the study of journalism: Critical Sociology, Cultural Sociology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Each approaches societal-cultural worlds from a particular set of interests and types of critique. Each has a different way of understanding meaning, the status of cultural production or performance and of defining its particular object of study, appropriate method and expected outcome. Critical sociology looks to emancipate actors from enduring structures of domination and exploitation. Mainstream journalism is defined as a weak field of forces that rely on audience commodities for revenue but demonstrates strength in choosing and framing content from agents in other fields. Cultural Sociology places a practical emphasis on understanding meaning and affect to explain the impact of the civil sphere on democratic structures. It looks to understand how journalism performs meaning and affect and how its professional culture endures and contributes to the civil sphere. The interest in ANT is in the agency of things and in the description of group formation as itself an explanation of the shift toward a new climate regime and version of democracy as a parliament of things.