Page 15 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

as the collective nature of Japanese society also edges toward the global trends
of consumerism and individualism.

The chapters
This book features stage-setting essays written by several of the world’s best
thinkers about communication and culture representing a range of academic
disciplines – communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology,
psychology, semiotics, and media studies. The book is divided into three
sections.
In the first section, ‘The foundations of culture’, we encounter a lively
spectrum of theoretical approaches to culture in the Communication Age
ranging from analysis of the perceptions of individual persons to the most
expansive, multimediated processes of global cultural flows and interactions.
Beginning with psychologist Edward C. Stewart’s provocative essay on the
‘Culture of the mind’, and the Brazilian-American semiotician Eduardo
Neiva’s equally arousing ‘Rethinking the foundations of culture’, we find that
the origins of cultural organization must account for emotion, fear, and the
close relationship between nature and culture, particularly as it manifests in the
‘predation paradigm’ and in struggles for human survival. These contemporary
Darwinian-influenced essays resonate with current theoretical trends in
molecular biology and genetics, and reflect the important ‘recent surge of
interest in the connections between biology and semiotics’ (Laubichler 1997:
248), particularly as it applies to cultural analysis. In a far less deterministic
argument that radically opposes the first two essays, the Swedish social anthro-
pologist Ulf Hannerz argues for a cosmopolitan understanding of culture that is
constructed through the analytical framework of the dynamic, multicultural
‘global ecumene’.
Section II explores various crucial ways for ‘Making sense of culture’. The
British sociologist David Chaney continues to develop his work on ‘lifestyle’
in the first essay by contrasting current cultural modalities and styles with
more traditional and stable ‘ways of life’. Writing from her home in Helsinki,
Finland, where in 2000 a single mother had been elected the country’s first
female president, the cultural sociologist Mirja Liikkanen evaluates the tremen-
dously important role of gender in culture and cultural analysis. The third
chapter in this section marks the first comprehensive discussion published in
English about an especially intriguing theoretical idea, ‘cultural fronts’, by the
Mexican cultural theorist and sociologist Jorge González. Finally, I take an
opportunity in this section to offer my own perspective on cultural ecology in
the Communication Age by outlining the key features of a broad concept I
term the ‘superculture’.
The last section of the book is labeled ‘Contemporary cultural forms’. It
features incisive perspectives on four analytical domains that have become
especially prominent in the Communication Age. Media studies theorist

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