Page 58 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CONVERSATION

In recent years the processes of convergence, which include diversification by
financial, computer and data processing companies into telecommunications,
have created multi-media giants that dominate sectors of the market. For example,
the 1989 merger of Time and Warner created the largest media group in the world. 35
This was followed in 1995 by Time-Warner’s acquisition of Turner Broadcasting
(CNN) and in 2000 by its merger with the major Internet company America On-
Line (AOL). Similarly, the acquisition by News Corporation during the 1990s of
the Hong Kong based Star TV for $525 million has allied Rupert Murdoch’s
European and American television interests, primarily BskyB (UK) and Fox TV
(USA), with a satellite footprint over Asia and the Middle East. Thus News
Corporation’s global television interests have a reach of some two-thirds of the
planet.
Links Mass media, multimedia corporation, synergy, television

Conversation The notion of conversation has two dimensions that are of significance
to cultural studies; namely, ‘conversation analysis’ as a methodology for exploring
cultural categories and the ‘conversation’ as a metaphor for understanding culture.
Conversation analysis emerged from a domain called ethnomethodology that has
been concerned with the ‘ethnomethods’ or local ‘folk’ understandings that people
deploy to construct and maintain social and cultural life. One of the core arguments
of ethnomethodology is that the social order is constructed in and through the
everyday activities and accounts (in language) of skilful and knowledgeable actors
(or members). The ethnomethods or resources that members draw on are also those
that constituted them and the wider social and cultural patterns.
Needless to say the primary focus of conversation analysis is on the organization
and structuring of conversations and the way that these form the very fabric of
cultural activity. In order to do this practitioners have developed a particular mode
of conversational transcription, notation and analysis. Although conversation
analysis has not played a significant part in the development of cultural studies as
a ‘discipline’, it does throw useful light on the workings of culture and has been
deployed to explore some of the crucial categories used by cultural studies. For
example, conversation analysis has been used to demonstrate the way in which
identity (a key concern of cultural studies during the 1990s) involves the ascription,
avowal and display of identity categories in the structures of conversations. Thus
conversation analysis explores how identity is achieved in the everyday flow of
ordinary talk.
The metaphor of ‘culture as a conversation’ grasps the dynamic and language-
oriented character of culture and allows us to consider the formation of meaning
and culture as formed in the joint action of social relationships. It directs us to the
constitutive and action orientation of language in the context of social dialogue and
underscores the importance of the social practice of reason-giving in the
justification of action. As such, culture is understood to involve agreement,
contestation and conflict over meanings and actions and highlights the variability
of accounts to which any state of affairs can be put. In particular, it assists us to