Culture and Media: A Dynamic Constitution

Abstract

Like any other scientific endeavor, cultural psychology, in its diverse manifestations, has been molded into an epistemological frame of reference, which has been unfolding for the last 2,500 years. However, it should be among the main methodological issues of any field concerned with culture to make this frame visible and to assess its impact on the discipline's theory and research practice. We believe media theory to hold a particular potential for this self-reflexive process. Despite its strong epistemological relation to many of the socio-genetic and socio-cultural concepts conveyed in this journal, media theory has gone largely, and surprisingly, unnoticed. In this paper, we recall media theory's main tenets and unfold them in an illustrative reflection on the co-evolution of writing systems and mentalities. While so doing, some of the theoretical and methodological formats inherited by Western science, and thus also by psychology, emerge: its strong tendency towards abstraction, unilinear causal chains and the separation of subject and object, among others.