Page 100 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

7 Media Theory and Sustainability Communication 83

Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger), media have
three functions:
• persuasive function: media serve “to integrate people in the system of consump-
tion without arousing their resistance”
• orienting function: media influence the consciousness of people “by their biased
tendencies in representing the options for action”
• ontological function: media determine “through the conservative archiving of
social knowledge the consciousness people have of themselves as a species”
(Viehoff 2002: 227).
This culturally pessimistic view assumes that the communicative power of the
media “destroys the actual emancipatory functions of social communication, espe-
cially however those of the aesthetic form of communication. This tendency can only
be broken by negative critique. This makes the ‘social subject’ (…) appear as a more
or less passive object of communication organised by the media” (Viehoff 2002: 227).
This position has to be seen in the context of its origin, which has changed since the
1970s and 1980s, when the emancipatory functions of mass medial cultural com-
munication were increasingly discussed. Cultural communication had more of a
positive effect on the development of social identity. Communication and cultural
sociological concepts (e.g. those of Hans Jonas, Pierre Bourdieu, Claus Offe) see in
medial communication the potential for class-specific interpretation and cultural
identity (Maletzke 1998: 227ff.). In this view both in the perception and the under-
standing of media content the individual cognitive efforts of the recipient(s) are the
basis for comprehensive explanations of media reception (Viehoff 2002).
The view of Adorno and Horkheimer, according to Kloock, “with its biting cri-
tique of the modern” (Kloock 2003: 24) is today an isolated one. Although the
effects of mass production and industrialisation support their radical theses, the con-
tamination of our food for example has not led to fundamental change. By contrast
the media-conditioned change of the world in regard to time and place is still of
crucial importance – and not only for media theory research. In particular increasing
globalisation leads especially to changes in space and time coordinates. “Much that
is place-bound will disappear” (Kloock 2003: 24). Since the 1990s there has been a
paradigm shift from the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ to the observation that in the
wake of increasing digitalisation and the global interconnectedness of all media new
social patterns and a new understanding of reality in the context of communication
and media is being discussed.

Effect and Use Analysis

Media create topical interest, assessments and models for public opinion. In the con-
text of the 1972 American presidential election, McCombs and Shaw (1972) put for-
ward the thesis that the media had an agenda-setting function that influenced which
topics people talk about. From this perspective, mass-communication messages