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Culture, the Public Sphere, and Media Sociology: A Search for a Classical Founder in the Work of Robert Park

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Abstract

This article examines the history of media sociology in the U.S., through a critical analysis of articles published in the major sociology journals during the twentieth century. I argue that media sociology has been at its most vibrant when its goal has been to understand the dominant cultural structures that shape the public sphere. Robert Park was the first sociologist to adopt this perspective, with his research on newspapers and the power of the press. This interest continued into the 1950s, with research on media and propaganda. By the 1960s, however, concern had shifted away from the public character of media, focusing instead on the ways in which social factors intervened between media messages and society. While important, this shift in analytical focus ultimately led to a more reductionist media sociology, which failed to explore how media provided a distinctive type of social output. There is evidence that a less reductionist media sociology has begun to emerge since the 1990s, with the rise of cultural sociology and theories of the public sphere. This new media sociology could increase its visibility within mainstream sociology by making more explicit connections to the Chicago School tradition, and by claiming Robert Park as its classical founder.

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Notes

  1. This summary is based on a count of articles about the media published in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Social Forces between 1900-2000. The decade of the 1920s was probably the high point of publication, with 13 articles published in AJS and 5 published in Social Forces (ASR did not begin publication until 1936). Articles about the media continued steadily through the 1930s (12 articles) and 1940s (12 articles), then increased during the 1950s, with nineteen published articles. There was then a sharp drop during the 1960s, with only six articles published. The organizational studies of the newsroom resulted in more articles about the media during the 1970s (15 articles) and 1980s (13 articles), but then there was a sharp decline in the 1990s, with only four articles published about the media in the flagship journals. I thank Dalia Abdel-Hady and Dan Glass for providing the research assistance that helped produce this summary.

  2. This argument is dramatically different from (and implies a critique of) much work in political communication, which has adopted Iyengar’s (1994) distinction of episodic vs. thematic news frames, and which has adopted a strong normative preference for the thematic over the episodic.

  3. McCormack (1952) took much the same approach, treating the propagandist as an important figure in modern social movements, particularly at the stage when these movements are trying to develop a coherent and persuasive ideology.

  4. This critique of Adorno was made most forcefully, perhaps, by Shibutani (1952).

  5. Media still had a strong (though more indirect) influence during this second phase of interpersonal influence, because the most influential members of many social networks were those early adopters and informational elites who were most involved with media products. Gitlin (1978) made a big point of this fact in a critique of the Katz and Lazarsfeld paradigm, arguing that the two-step flow model actually demonstrated the great power of media, even if it posited a more indirect model of media power. A closer reading of Katz and Lazarsfeld, however, shows that Gitlin probably overstated this critique, and that Katz and Lazarsfeld did in fact account for the continued relevance of media power during both phases of social influence (see. E.g., Katz 1960: 440).

  6. More recently, there has been a shift away from conceptualizing public rhetoric using the language of frames, and a corresponding shift toward narrative approaches. See Kane 1997; Polletta 2006; Jacobs and Sobieraj 2007.

  7. This analytical move, which demands that abstract normative political theories be subjected to empirical concretization, was made to great effect in the civil society/public sphere debates by Alexander (1998) and Fraser (1992).

  8. For the clearest and most forceful description of cultural sociology and its commitment to cultural autonomy, see Alexander and Smith (2003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University at Albany, State University of New York, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Ronald N. Jacobs

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  1. Ronald N. Jacobs
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Correspondence to Ronald N. Jacobs.

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I wish to thank Eleanor Townsley for providing helpful comments on a previous draft. I also thank Peter Beilharz, Rod Benson, Elihu Katz, Michael Schudson, and Barbie Zelizer for participating in a special session on the history of media sociology, which I organized for the 2007 meetings of the American Sociological Association. Collectively, their papers encouraged me to consider this history from a variety of different perspectives.

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Jacobs, R.N. Culture, the Public Sphere, and Media Sociology: A Search for a Classical Founder in the Work of Robert Park. Am Soc 40, 149–166 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-009-9070-5

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