From Media Use to Doing Media

Abstract

The conception of agency as a comprehensive mode of media reception poses a challenge for the approach of doing media. Agency, in this sense, is not necessarily linked to a certain medium or to a specific mediality. It is conceptualized as a mode of reception that represents a process of communication, interaction and meaning making between audience and text. This form of nonspecificality in terms of media necessitates an interdisciplinary perspective on media reception. The field of media and media use not only features numerous disciplines and traditions of research, but also media related specificities have resulted in numerous – sometimes dispersed – branches of research and scholarship. Many scholars have outlined and elucidated on the plurality and heterogeneity of disciplines, studies and theories (cf. Prommer 2012: 24). When recapitulating approaches of media reception and media communication in the following, an action-oriented perspective is employed that assembles – with no claim to and with no necessity for completeness – appropriate approaches from communication studies, media studies, television theory, film theory, interactivity approaches and game studies.