This paper examines means of facilitating research on media as a critical component of contemporary culture based on assessments of recent publications on media. The primary target is in the fundamentally heuristic value of social theories relative to the topic. Based on semiotics, practice, and, to a much lesser degree, speech act theory, analysts generate constructs wherein media often deviate from the conceptual horizons in respective schemes. Reading Derrida’s views on speech act theory suggests that an endeavor to resolve the mismatch demands the decomposition of core concepts of a theory. Just as Anderson’s formulation casts a delicate light on the use of semiotics in media research, media prefigured through the lenses of the performative forces us to rethink its presence in everyday occurrence as a problematic unthought. The paper concludes that the application of speech act theory to media is a plausible solution to the problems so far encountered if accompanied by historical perspectives on the formation of illocutionary acts.
Media, as constituting mass-produced vehicles of information, existed long before Benjamin made his proclamation about the end of a cultural epoch. 1 However, media’s sphere of influence has never diversified as quickly as in our current period. Media today replicate in unfamiliar ways everyday across the globe, 2 and in versions of the newly emerged media culture, the difficulty of conceptualizing the unthought is no less problematic than in metropolitan counterparts.