Note: this site will be moving soon.
In order to understand a culture, it's important to explore what its people value, and how they express those values through their actions in both public and in private realms. For more than ten years, Clark and her colleagues have been asking people in the U.S. what they value and what they aspire to in their relationships, their jobs, and in their free time, and we’ve heard some of the same things over and over: a healthy family, a strong faith tradition, a rewarding job, freedom. Often, however, when people are asked about how their actions and choices in public life relate to what is deeply meaningful to them, they are at a loss for words. In part, this is because in the U.S. we tend to be individualistic, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues have famously argued, and therefore it’s easier for us to think about our personal motivations than our obligations to the larger society. But this inability to explain our actions also comes about because we are less motivated by rationality than we might like to believe. In the research and teaching that we do, we emphasize that people often choose to do things less because of the perceived ends they are trying to achieve, and more out of an often-unconscious, taken-for-granted understanding of how things should be done. Obviously, people don’t always act logically. We do what we do mostly as a result of what we’ve learned in our observations of the people we care about, and then we share stories with one another that reinforce our shared values. In our view, then, culture is the store of public symbols and stories that flesh out and reinforce these taken-for-granted understandings of how things should be done. It is in the stories and myths, the sounds and images of a culture, then, that people are able to make sense of their lives, and to ascribe meaning to their actions. Because the entertainment and news media are important sources of public storytelling, they figure prominently in the stories we tell each other about who we are and what we value. Certainly, there are huge industries involved in the decision-making processes of which stories get to be told, and how, in the mass media. Yet what becomes popular tells us about not only the values of those industries, but about what resonates among people themselves. (and mysterious) art of academic conferences? For some practical tips click here! Stories in popular communication, therefore, can tell us something about the shared beliefs and values that people hold. They offer scripts for action and reinforcement for choices made. They reassure us that the world is as we imagine it to be. As Iver B. Neumann has said, “There is considerable value in demonstrating how specific representations contribute to maintaining worlds as they are.” In our research and teaching, we are therefore interested in talking to young people and their famlies about their media preferences, and in making connections between these preferences and public life, so that we all might be better able to address the inequities and problems of today’s world in ways that are meaningful and fair for all. | site design | e-mail contact | site map | Additional Contact Information:
|
elcome
to the Media, Culture and Meaning site at the University of Denver.
This site is a research arm of the 
| Publications | |
|
