Mass Entertainment and Community: Toward a Culture-Centered Paradigm for Mass Communication Research

Abstract

In this essay, we begin with a review of the arguments in the debate over media and then seek to move beyond the narrow issues raised by previous media criticism. We argue that a culture-centered paradigm for media scholarship is emerging that explicitly abandons many of the assumptions about media and audiences that were central to the old debate. This paradigm offers the possibility of integrating a broad range of current research in our field and could provide a means of stemming conflict between qualitative and quantitative scholars. After outlining this paradigm we discuss current scholarship and present an agenda for future research.