Understanding Culture, Understanding Communication

1. Understanding Culture, Understanding Communication Szerző: Lázár Imre Lektor:Mile András

2. Introduction • In this unit students will become familiar with the history of cultural concepts and their natural, social, technological and ideological contexts.In the second part we will explorethe dimensionsof human communication, with its ethological and evolutionary background, and reveal its social, cultural and technological contexts with special regard to textual communication, visual and media rhetoric and its discourse context.

3. Content • First part : Understanding Culture • What is culture? • The stages of development of the Germanconcepts of culture • Semantic history of the word ‘culture’ • English and American concepts of culture in Humanities • Broad anthropological definitions • Multidimensional anthropological concepts of culture • Emphasis on Nature • Emphasis on social structures and Interactions • Emphasis on ideas • Emphasis on culture as technology

4. Content II. • Part two: Meaning, Culture and Communication • What is communication? • Communication in 4T framework • The natural context of communication • Schools of Communication in Social Context • Cross-cultural encounter: identity and homogenization • Communication and Culture • Textualist Approaches of Communication • Mixed Culturalist and Textual Approach • Language, where culture and communication meets • Image as text • Communicative operations with meaning in images • Texts: language, image and film • Media texts in discourse context

5. First part Theories of culture

6. What is culture ? • Early definitions before the advent of cultural anthropology: • While travelling, having realized that all those who have attitudes very different from our own are not for that reason barbarians or savages but are as rational or more so than ourselves, and having considered how greatly the self-same person with the self-same mind who had grown up from infancy among the French or Germans would become different from what he would have been if he had always lived among the Chinese or the cannibals . (Descartes, Discourse on Method [cit. by Kroeber, Kluckhohn, Untereiner, and Meyer] 4.) • Voltaire stated,“first put aside dynasties, king lists, and battles, and sought what is essential in history, namely culture, as it is manifest in customs, in beliefs, and in forms of government.” (Gustav E., Klemm. 1854:Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft.) • Present day definitions, applied byorganizational science: • “Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values.” (Geert Hofstede) • “Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.” (Edgar Schein)

7. Early stages of development of German concepts of Culture • Historical, universalist frames (late XVIII. century: Herder) • Herder construedCultur as a progressive cultivation or development of faculties. • In Herderian context culture means progress in cultivation toward enlightenment, but the idea of progress is well tempered by an intrinsic interest in the variety of forms that culture has assumed with comparative, almost ethnographic accents inclined toward relativism. This Herderianheritage strongly influenced Boas through Wundt. • Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. • Culture with universal roots • Adolf Bastian proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas”; different cultures, or different "folk ideas”, are local modifications of the elementary ideas. • The historical overview of culture is partly based on the work of Kroeber, A. L., Kluckhohn, W. A.,Untereyner, A.G., and Meyer, 1952: Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.Vintage Books.

8. Semantic history of the word ‘culture’ • Culture, in terms of intellectual as well as technical context. • Klemm created an ethnographical frame of concept of culture with contemporary accents predating Tylor’s concept of an in-between stage, but he neverformally defined culture in its modern sense. • Kant uses the term Cultur with the meaning of cultivating or becoming.“We become cultivated through art and science, we become civilized [by attaining] to a variety of social graces and refinements [or decencies]”. • According to Wundt the word“Culture” is derived from latin ‘colere’, while the term “cultus” comes form “cultus deorum”. From this there developed the mediaeval cultura mentis; from which grew the dual concepts of geistige and materielle Kultur. • Wundt’s influentialconcept of collective representations as part of a collective “psyche”, like language, myths and religion became a starting point for those anthropologists, who attended him in Leipzig, like Boas, Malinowski, Durkheim or Mauss. According to Wundt culture tends to isolate or segregate itself on national lines, civilization to spread its content to other nations; hence cultures which have • developed out of civilizations, which derive from them, remain dependent on • other cultures. Wundt, 1920: Kultur und Geschichte,Völkerpsychologie 10 Vol.

9. English and American concepts of Culture in Humanities • Matthew Arnold: a pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.(Arnold, M. 1869: Culture and Anarchy) • F. Znaniecki: We shall use the term "culturalism" for the view of the world which should be constructed on the ground of the implicit or explicit presuppositions involved in reflection about cultural phenomena . . .The progress of knowledge about culture demonstrates more and more concretely the historical relativity of all human values, including science itself. (Znaniecki, F. 1919: Cultural Reality) • Ernest Cassirer: Human culture taken as a whole may be described as the process of man's progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science are various phases in this process. In all of them man discovers and proves a new power —the power to build up a world of his own, an "ideal" world. (Cassirer, E. 1944: Essay on Man. 228) • T. S. Eliot: . . . culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life. The conscious self-cultivation of the individual, his attempt to raise himself out of the average mass to the level of the élite; the ways of believing, thinking, and feelingof the particular group within society to which an individual belongs; and the still less conscious ways of life of a total society.

10. Broad Anthropological Definitions • Culture can be understood as a comprehensive totality, implying an enumeration of aspects of culture content. • Tylor, 1871: Culture, or civilization, . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. • Benedict, 1929: . . . that complex whole which includes all the habits acquired by man as a member of society. • Boas, F. : Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the products of human activities as determined by these habits. • Malinowski, B.: It [culture] obviously is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumers' goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. • Kluckhohn and Kelly:Culture is that complex whole which includes artifacts, beliefs, art, all the other habits acquired by man as a member of society, and all products of human activity as determined by these habits. • The knowledge of ways of adjusting to our surroundings, both human and physical; language, customs, and systems of etiquette, ethics, religion, and morals that have • been built up through the ages.”

11. Multidimensional anthropological concepts of culture Marxist, neo-marxist anthropologies Economic anthropology Applied anthropologies Emphasis on Culture asTechnology Culture as mean of biocultural adaptation Cultural materialism (Marvin Harris) Culture in context of environmental possibilism Culture in context of environmental determinism Culture in context of neoevolutionary frame Ecological anthropology Culture in frame of interpretive anthropology (Geertz) Cognitive anthropology Symbolic anthropology Anthropology of religion Culture in frame of symbolic interactionism Emphasis on Ideas Emphasis on Nature Emphasis on Social Structures and interactions Culture in frames of social anthropology Political anthropology Anthropology of law

12. Emphasis on Nature • Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments. Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment. Julian Steward,was one who, interpreted the patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the environment and assessing these patterns of behavior influencing belief system, and other parts of the cultural complex. • Ecological anthropology is the “study of cultural adaptations to environments”. or "the study of relationships between a population of humans and their biophysical environment”. Roy Rappaport explored the relationship between culture and the natural environment expressed by rituals in the processual relationship between the two. • Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism, is the view that the physical environment sets limits on human environment. (Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen Churchill Semple). • Cultural materialism "is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence.” Marvin incorporated and refined Marx's categories of superstructure and base, but in contrast with Marx included demographic dynamics as determinant factors in socio-cultural evolution.

13. Emphasis on Social Structures and Interactions • Social Anthropology studies social structures and organization, customs, economic and political organization, law, patterns of production, exchange, and consumption, family structure and kinship, childrearing and socialization. • Structural functionalism is a research and interpretive framework for society as a system, where social structures shape society as a whole, exploring both social structure and social functions embodied in customs, roles, institutions, and ruled by norms and traditions. • Symbolic interactionism offers social context to perceived reality developed by interaction with others. Even physical reality does indeed exist by an individual's social definitions, and that social definitions do develop in part or relation to something “real.” Culture and behaviour is defined by a reflective, socially understood meaning, people respond to reality via the social understanding of reality.

14. Emphasis on Ideas • (Ward 1903, 235)A culture is a social structure, a social organism, if any one prefers, and ideas are its germs. • (Wissler 1916, 197). . . . a culture is a definite association complex of ideas. • (Blumenthal 1937, 3,12) a) Culture is the world sum-total of past and present cultural ideas. b) Culture consists of the entire stream of inactive and active cultural ideas from the first in the cosmos to the last. • (Osgood 1940, 25)Culture consists of all ideas concerning human beings which have been communicated to one's mind and of which one is conscious. • (Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945, 97). . . . a summation of all the ideas for standardized types of behavior. • By [holistic] culture as a descriptive concept, I mean all those mental constructs or ideas which have been learned or created after birth by an individual. . . The term idea includes such categories as attitudes, meanings, sentiments, feelings, values, goals, purposes, interests, knowledge, beliefs, relationships, associations... • (Taylor, W.W.1948: A Study of Archaeology. American Anthropological Association, Memoir. 69)

15. Emphasis on Ideas • Symbolic and interpretive anthropologyis the study of cultural symbols and how those symbols can be interpreted to better understand a particular society. • Interpretive anthropologyis concerned with the operations of "culture" rather than the ways in which symbols operate in the social process. • Symbolic anthropologyis concerned with the operations of "society" and the ways in which symbols operate within it, and studies symbols and the processes,such as myth and ritual, by which humans assign meanings to these symbols to address fundamental questions about human social life (Spencer 1996). • “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Clifford Geertz Victor Turner, Mary Douglas) • Structural anthropology is based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' idea that people think about the world in terms of binary opposites — such as high and low, inside and outside, person and animal, life and death—and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites. Structuralist anthropology focuses on meaning, as established by contrasts between various aspects of culture and sees actions as being separate from the actors. (Ortner 1984). (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, and Rodney Needham)

16. Emphasis on Culture as Technology • (Ellwood, 1927, 9) [Culture includes] on the one hand, the whole of man's material civilization, tools, weapons, clothing, shelter, machines, and even systems of industry; and, on the other hand all of non-material, or spiritual civilization, such as language, literature, art, religion, ritual, morality, law, and government. • (Wilky, 1927, 500) …that part of the environment which man has himself created and to which he must adjust himself. • White and Childe stress modes of technology. • J. Folsom states, culture is the sum total of all that is artificial. It is the complete outfit of tools, and habits of living, which are invented by man and then passed on from one generation to another. (Folsom, J. 1928:Culture and Social Progress. New York) • Culture is not any part of man or his inborn equipment. It is the sum total of all that man has produced: tools, symbols, most organizations, common activities, attitudes, and beliefs. (Folsom, J. 1931:Social Psychology. New York) • In Marxism, the concepts devised to express the totality of all social phenomena in their interrelation is not culture, but the mode of production, with its two important sub-concepts, the forces of production and the social relations of production.

17. Dimensions of Culture • Hofstede G. : Cultural dimensions • Power Distance Index (PDI) is defined as “the extent to which the less powerful members • of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributedunequally”. • Individualism (IDV) Hofstede defines this dimension as follows: “individualism pertains tosocieties in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself orherself and his or her immediate family. • Masculinity (MAS) focuses on the degree to which ‘masculine’ values like competitiveness andthe acquisition of wealth are valued over ‘feminine’ values like relationship building and quality of life. • Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) focuses on the level of tolerance for uncertainty and • ambiguity within the society. • Long-Term Orientation (LTO) (formerly called Confucian Dynamism)focuses on the degree the society embraces, or does not embrace, long-term devotion to traditional values. • Hall ET • Iceberg Model • Monochronic versus Polychronic Cultures • High context/low context culture

18. Meaning, Culture and Communication • Culture is asystem derived from meaningful human activity, while communication is the domain of the intended or unintended exchange of meanings between social/ cultural agents. • The processes of communication produce meanings; cultural production brings into existence meaningful objects, which in their turn communicate their meanings. The concepts of meaning therefore inextricably links these two aspects of the one domain. • Every act of communication is a cultural event. The structures, processes and contents of communication are given by culture. Nothing outside culture can be a part of communication. • Culture generates a framework for communication, and creates constraints for what can be communicated, what is communicable, and for how it is communicated. • “On the one hand, anything outside the scope of communication is non-cultural. On the other hand, as communication is a cultural process, new cultural meanings are constantly produced in the processes of communication.” • Kress, G. 1988: Communication and Culture: An Introduction. • New South Wales University Press.

19. Iceberg and Onion modells of Culture • Hall’s Iceberg Model • Schein’s Iceberg Model • Goldman’s Iceberg • Hofstede’s layers of culture • Trompenaars’s cultural layers

20. Literature • Benedict, R. 1929: The Science of Custom, The Century Magazine, Vol. 117. 641-649. Reprinted in The Making of Man. edited by V. F. Calverton, Modern Library, 805-817. • Cassirer E. 1944: Essay on Man. New Haven, Yale University Press. • Hall E.T. 1976: Beyond Culture. Anchor Books • Kress G. 1988: Communication and Culture: An Introduction . New South Wales University Press • Kroeber, A. L., Kluckhohn, W. A. Untereyner, A.G., Meyer, 1952: Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.Vintage Books • Ortner, Sherry B. 1984: Theory in anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 26.126-166. • Schein E.Organizational Culture and Leadership in http://www.fsrpsychologie.uni-jena.de/fsr_psychologiemedia/-p-102.pdf?rewrite_engine=id • Spencer, Jonathan. 1996: Symbolic Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer ed. Pp. 535-539. London and New York, Routledge. • Taylor, W. W. 1948. A Study of Archaeology.American Anthropological Association, Memoir 69. • Wundt W. 1920: Kultur und Geschichte,Völkerpsychologie 10 Vol.

21. Part two Meaning, Culture and Communication

22. What is communication • Communicationis the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information between a sender, and a recipient, where the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. • Communication is 'social interaction through messages' (Fiske 1990) • 'a process in which participants create and share information with one another in order to reach a mutual understanding‘ (Rogers 1995: 35) • 'a process in which there is some predictable relation between the message transmitted and the message received' (Graber 2003). • Transactional model of communication: individuals are simultaneously engaging in the sending and receiving of messages.

23. Communication in 4T framewok • All linguistic action exerts social and cultural effects, where language used is under • influence of power relations, or social and political group resistance, being both a means of control and a means of evading control and of effecting change. • Innovative social(sociospherical) and cultural (infospherical) and/ortechnological(technospherical) dynamics imbedded in the constant andchanging • natural context and environmental settings’ textdynamics • is also reflected by linguistic changes framed • by changing cultural and social context. • Even traditional key terms of a given • language may gain new meaning, • and some of the older terms may be • abandoned.

24. Natural context of communication • Darwin, Ch.: The expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals • Nonverbal communication, Where Nature Meets Culture • The Evolution of Communication • Key fields connected with animal communication: Animal communication, • Animal cognition, Emotion in animals,Behavioral ecology, Cognitive ethology, Instinct, Neuroethology, Sociobiology • Human Ethologists dealing with field ·Charles Darwin, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Richard Dawkins, Wulf Schiefenhüvel • Forms of communication • Gestures • Facial expression • Gaze • Vocalization • Olfactory communication • Body language • How to read body language : videos on the theme

25. Schools of Communication in Social Context Communication studies of interdisciplinary ventures, drawing from sociology, philosophy and literary studies - informed by Marxist theory as in the case of researchers in Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham – were established in Britain in the 1970s. (Raymond Williams and Jacques Derrida ) The Frankfurt School, under the leadership of Jürgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno, although developing separately from the CCCS, followed a parallel neo-Marxist approach aimed at investigating the ideological overtunes and undertunes of communication and media activities, especially as they relate to political factors, governmental regulation and public policy and the public sphere, and such new territories of communication studies like social media.

26. Cross-cultural encounter: identity and homogenization • Relative isolation keeps a community within their ownculture. The degree to which thisidentity and cultural character is shared by neighboring local groups depends largely upon the means and extent of inter-communication. • Ease of communication and (tele)communication and geographical mobility may produce • considerable cultural similarity over wide areasgenerating important social cleavages which cut • across local groupings, as in the case of social classes. For most of the peoples of the earth, • however, the community has been both the • primary unit of social participation • andthe distinctive culture-bearing group. • Figure • Ling FYY, Ang AMH, Lim SSY (2007) • "Encounters between foreigners and Chinese: • Perception and management of culturaldifferences", • Engineering, Construction and Architectural • Management, Vol. 14 Iss: 6, pp.501 - 518

27. Communication and culture • Culture includes everything that can be communicated from one generation to another. The culture of a people is their social heritage, a "complex whole" which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, techniques of tool fabrication and use, and methods of communication. • Culture is historical or cumulative: • - in that it is communicated through education, and its content is encased in patterns (that is, standardized procedures or idea systems), • - it is also dogmatic as to its content and resentful of differences, • - its contribution to the individual is absorbed largely unconsciously, leading to a subsequent development of emotional reinforcements, and that the raising of these into consciousness is less likely to lead to insight and objective analysis than to explanations ad hoc. • “Those patterns of group life which exist only by virtue of the three-fold mechanism—invention, communication, and social habituation—belong to the cultural order. . .”(Warden, C.J. 1936:The Emergence Of Human Culture.Macmillan Co. • “Culture . . . is communicable intelligence. . . . In its material no less than in its oral form culture is, then, as it were, the language of social life, the sole medium for expressing the consciousness of our common humanity.” (Marett, R.R, 1928)

28. Textualist Approaches of Communication • The textual approaches were developed in continental Europe, in Estonia, in France, and in Scandinavian countries, such as Denmark. Textual studies were initially strongly language-based, and in many institutions they were (and often still are) integrated as a branch of linguistics or anthropology. • They are closely associated with the work of structuralist semioticians, who compared a variety of texts, in both oral and written forms, to distinguish common underlying patterns that might not be obvious at a surface level. These approaches combined linguistic analysis with rhetoric, and concepts from the philosophy of language, to examine how and in which ways people make sense of the world as inscribed in language. (Jurij Lotman. Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, Algirdas Greimas)

29. Mixed Culturalist and Textual Approach • Since the beginnings of textual approaches in the 1960s, many scholars have pursued their analysis from linguistic texts to non-verbal behaviour, such as dress, advertising and ritual, as well as film. • Such approaches cut across the other two branches of communication studies in that they are interested in both universal, cog-nitive aspects of communication (i.e. how the human mind works) and the cultural manifestations of these aspects (i.e. what gives each text its particular take on the universal, or its unique 'flair'). • Culturalist approaches maybe influenced by textual studies as in case of French structuralist scholars: Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. They have strongly influenced the study of ideology and power in social life by British culturalists..

30. Language, where culture and communication crosses over • Social structures and linguistic forms such as language and culture are intimately intermeshed. Every language implies a system of values, meanings, practices and structures of the society. Based on Wundt’s concepts of Völkerpsychology, anthropological particularism created a particularist framework dedicated to the systems of linguistic modelling of the (natural and social) worlds theoretised by Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir. This framework is closed to the meaning centred, interpretive approaches where language constitutes meaning, and meaning is always and everywhere structured by differences of value systems (ideologies) and by differences of power (emphasized in the critical interpretive schools) . • Use of language is always social and sometimes a power practice: reflecting differences between social groupings, genders, racial or ethnic variations, which are reproduced in forms of language, registers, vocabularies. dialects encoded in linguistic forms. • These social and cultural differences, status markers, socio-cultural barriers can be challenged, confirmed, reproduced, subverted, by the use of linguistic forms. • The notion of text as the result of language processes in given social contexts are necessary for decoding the meaning of this text for sake of effective communication. • Multiplicity of voices: the spoken texts are not restricted to the speaking communicator, but usually reflect discourses, as the voices of social institutions (education, bureaucracies, work, leisure, the mass media, religion, neighbourhood, or conventions and registers, and language habits of gender, class) speaking through or with the individual speaker.

31. Communication in technological context • Techno-history of communication • Information Technology • Technology and • new social media

32. Image as text • Images are texts, in the sense , that images are interpreted on the basis of cultural conventions, and codes used by the hermeneutic community. But even a text may gain visual rhetoric content as in case of typography. • Images contain ideological meanings just as verbal texts, and readers/viewers are therefore positioned, as participants, in complex cultural and ideological structures and processes. • Visual rhetorical elements: depth and surface, surface structure, presence and absence, metaphor, metonymy, colour symbolism, intertextuality. Research projects are designed to explore the working dynamics of visual rhetoric. • Visual metaphors, where “in certain cultural contexts, there are visual qualities that lend themselves to symbolic use.” (Erich Gombrich, 1973) • John Berger (Ways of Seeing) “Every image embodies a way of seeing. Images taken as texts are built into similar structures as verbal texts. Verbal texts attempt to construct reading positions providing a stance for readers. The same happens in case of images as visual texts providing ‘viewing positions’.” • The images as “intertexts” in the sense Kristeva uses, are where one set of textual elements is transposed into (or superimposed onto) another. Image as text can tell, re-tell and transform the meanings that already adheres to objects in a frame of given cultural principles.

33. Communicative operations with meaning in images • The structure of presence/absence allows us to infer important meanings about the ideological constructedness of a text. • Visual metonymy uses relocation of meaning (and, in a way, a way of making meaning harder to get at), but also of making only one meaning available, unspeakable and obvious at the same time. Metonymy offers a privileged view that, although available to everyone who sees it, manages to personalise the view for all involved. • Denotative and connotative operations with the image are culturally sensitive acts. • The image operates on a code that allows the viewer to skip from recognising ‘what is there’ to recognising the meaning of ‘what is there‘, the photo as ‘a message without a code’ (Barthes,Image-Music- Text) • The structure of the image is an ideological one, where cultural and social meanings, and the contingencies of the structures of the communicative situation exert their effect.

34. Texts: language, image and film • All media texts are social, and constructed and perceived in a hermeneutic space of producers and consumers of the given text. The complexities of the meanings of filmconsist of language, visual images, music and other sound, colour and light, time and narrative structures, at the same time produced and perceived to provide means of understanding the process that lead to the production of these texts, and the equally complex process of their reception, reading and reconstruction by the reader. • Media texts can be understood by considering narrative structures, generic conventions, ideological functions and social and cultural assumptions embodied in the kinematographic, scenic and acoustic text of the media content shaped by the moral-ethical production, its economic imperatives, and the ideological discourse. • The media texts embodied in the structure, the kinds of characters and incidents used, even patterns of dialogue are highly conventionalised, almost standardised productions testing audience familiarity with these conventions, incorporating that recognition into their construction of a text. These conventions organise texts into particular classes or genres. Meaning arises in the complex interaction between text or representation framed in the given genres, or in mixed genres carrying particular significance(s) for the audience and interacting with other genres representedby the audience, and the society in which it is viewed.

35. Media texts in discoursecontext • Discourses are systematically organised sets of statements that give expression to the meanings and values of an institution, defining what it is possible to say and not possible to say. A discourse provides a set of possible statements about a given area, and organises and gives structure to the manner in which a particular topic, object, process is to be talked about. In that it provides descriptions, rules, permissions and prohibitions of social and individual interaction. • Media texts may be taken as a dialogue or interference of such discoursesharmonizing or conflicting with each other. • The intertextuality of media texts can have a subversive or radical function within a text, because it can alert the critical viewer to similarities between genres which apparently have very different interests and aims. • Understanding the significance and meaning of the text status of those texts in relation to the social formation of which they are at once product, process, expression and reinforcement, needs analysis of financial determinants, production practices and audience expectation.