The Field of American Media Sociology: Origins, Resurrection, and Consolidation

Abstract

This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the field in works that study media inwards – along the threefold dimensions of production and technologies, communication and discourse, reception and effects – and works that study media outwards. We argue that this latter perspective, examining broader theoretical, methodological, and substantive social implications of mass‐mediated communication, is the most promising one for a mature field of American media sociology. On this basis, we conclude with some suggestions regarding possible new, and as of yet understudied, lines of inquiry for future media sociologists.

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“…Indeed, the four founding fathers of communication research were more social psychological than sociological (Berelson, 1959, see the differences between the two in Livingstone, 2014). There have been amplified voices from within sociology that engaging with communication and media would enable the re-imagination of sociology as a discipline about key sociological concepts such as institution, inequality, and text (Brienza & Revers, 2016;Nichols, 2009;Revers & Brienza, 2017).…”