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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 63
theoretical approaches far removed from the universe of structuralism. It was
also present in the ‘social construction of reality’ approach, developed by Berger
and Luckmann (1966). Interactionist deviancy theory, which we earlier
suggested first identified the question of ‘the definition of the situation’ and ‘who
defines whom?’ also moved, though more tentatively, in the same direction.
David Matza’s book, Becoming Deviant, concluded with a strange and wayward
section, intriguingly entitled ‘Signification’ (Matza, 1969). Also relevant was the
work of the ethnomethodologists, with their concern for the strategies involved
in the understandings of everyday situations, the form of practical accounting by
means of which societal members produced the social knowledge they used to
make themselves understood, and their increasing attention to conversational
strategies.
In the structuralist approach, the issue turned on the question of signification.
This implies, as we have already said, that things and events in the real world do
not contain or propose their own, integral, single and intrinsic meaning, which is
then merely transferred through language. Meaning is a social production, a
practice. The world has to be made to mean. Language and symbolization is the
means by which meaning is produced. This approach dethroned the referential
notion of language, which had sustained previous content analysis, where the
meaning of a particular term or sentence could be validated simply by looking at
what, in the real world, it referenced. Instead, language had to be seen as the
medium in which specific meanings are produced. What this insight put at issue,
then, was the question of which kinds of meaning get systematically and
regularly constructed around particular events. Because meaning was not given
but produced, it followed that different kinds of meaning could be ascribed to the
same events. Thus, in order for one meaning to be regularly produced, it had to win
a kind of credibility, legitimacy or taken-for-grantedness for itself. That involved
marginalizing, down-grading or de-legitimating alternative constructions.
Indeed, there were certain kinds of explanation which, given the power of and
credibility acquired by the preferred range of meanings were literally unthinkable
or unsayable (see Hall et al., 1977). Two questions followed from this. First, how
did a dominant discourse warrant itself as the account, and sustain a limit, ban or
proscription over alternative or competing definitions? Second, how did the
institutions which were responsible for describing and explaining the events of
the world—in modern societies, the mass media, par excellence—succeed in
maintaining a preferred or delimited range of meanings in the dominant systems
of communication? How was this active work of privileging or giving preference
practically accomplished?
This directed attention to those many aspects of actual media practice which
had previously been analysed in a purely technical way. Conventional
approaches to media content had assumed that questions of selection and
exclusion, the editing of accounts together, the building of an account into a
‘story’, the use of particular narrative types of exposition, the way the verbal and
visual discourses of, say, television were articulated together to make a certain