The metaphor of resonance often describes the fit between a message and an audience’s worldviews. Yet scholars have largely ignored the cognitive processes audiences use to interpret messages and interactions that determine why certain messages and other cultural objects appeal to some but not others. Drawing on pragmatism, we argue that resonance occurs as cultural objects help people puzzle through practical challenges they face or construct. We discuss how cognitive distance and the process of emotional reasoning shape the likelihood of cultural resonance. We argue resonance is an emergent process structured by interactions between individuals that shape each other’s interpretation of cultural objects, diffuse objects through interactional circuits, and create opportunities for resonance among people facing similarly shaped problems. Our approach thus identifies new processes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis that shape resonance and describes the pathways that might allow resonance to crystallize into broader mobilization and social change.

AIDS media lead unexpected lives once distributed through urban space: billboards fade, posters go missing, bumper stickers travel to other cities. The materiality of AIDS campaign objects and of the urban settings in which they are displayed structures how the public interprets their messages. Ethnographic observation of AIDS media in situ and interview data reveal how the materiality of objects and places shapes the availability of AIDS knowledge in Accra, Ghana. Significantly for AIDS organizations, these material conditions often systematically obstruct access to AIDS knowledge for particular groups. Attending to materiality rethinks how scholars assess the cultural power of media.

No abstract

No abstract

In sociology, a cultural object is the "binding" of significance to a material form. But, how do people "bind" otherwise discrete elements as a single element? In cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, this is known as the "binding problem." Sociologists can learn from research on binding, as it deepens our understanding of cultural objects, learning, and social change. Binding is the process by which a material "token" is assimilated into (or expands the boundaries of) a cognitive "type," or resists such typification thereby leading to the formation of a new cognitive "type." Cultural objects are simultaneously types and tokens, and the interplay between them results in a fundamental cultural instability. Binding is an attempt to stabilize meaning in two ways: the first, innovating, is implicated in the emergence of a cultural object, and the second, indexicalizing, in its maintenance and extension. However, even the process of indexicalizing a well-established type-i.e., the proliferation of tokensprovides the material fodder from which to innovate new types. Attention to binding processes in the production and reception of cultural objects reveals important insight into the dynamics of cultural change and stability.