This piece aims to explain some of the foundational works and ideas of symbolic interactionism. It also aims to briefly examine media power as well as the response to revelations about domestic surveillance through the symbolic interactionist lens.
Symbolic Interactionism
That the media wield great power in society today is nothing new, with the fields of communication and media studies including everything from the study of face-to-face conversations, to the impact of literature on its readers, to the impact of social networking websites on election outcomes. However, just a century ago the field was a mere fragment of what it is today. It was in the 1890s three Americans by the names of Robert Park, John Dewey, and Charles Horton Cooley began to deeply examine communication and its impact in light of the technological advances they were witnessing. What came out of their formulations about the importance and impact of media and communication, among other things, was what would become known as the symbolic interactionist perspective.
Arguably the most famous of the three today is John Dewey. Coming from the pragmatist tradition of philosophy, Dewey felt that the potential of modern communication for the advancement and betterment of society was being underutilized. Additionally, he felt that communication had the capacity to reconcile “individual freedom with social responsibility” (Czitrom 1983:92), an idea that would impact the thought of both Cooley and Park. Setting aside his failed attempts to publish newspapers that sought to combine philosophy, science, and journalism, Dewey understood communication as having an important liberating potential that would allow people to “live in a world of things that have meaning” (Dewey quoted in Czitrom 1983:109). Though Dewey did recognize that the press often worked to serve private ends, “the power of the business entrepreneur to carry on his own business in his own way for the sake of private profit,” (Dewey 1987:270)[1] he also noted that there are some publications that “have an acute sense of responsibility” (Dewey 1987:270). It was in these few publications that Dewey felt the “traditional sense of political and moral obligation might be recovered” (Czitrom 1983:112) especially in the case of organized intelligence and scientific inquiry being made public through those publications. Thus, Dewey recognized the limitations of the press and the economic incentives to pursue profits over social betterment, but he remained tied to the idea that by combining the communication potential of modern media technologies with scientific inquiry, society could effectively be improved.
Robert Park was an influential member of the Chicago School of sociology, after working as a journalist and completing his dissertation “The Crowd and the Public” in 1904. This work “offered the first grouping toward an American theory of collective behavior and public opinion” (Czitrom 1983:114). Park believed that a distinction should be made between the ‘crowd’ and the ‘public, where the former was based on feelings and instincts, and the latter coalesced around the interaction of thinking and reason. In 1921 Park theorized that society could be understood organically (as an organism) and that it had four key components: competition, which resulted in an economic order; conflict, where competitors saw others as rivals; accommodation, where hostilities calmed; and assimilation, where people take on the ideas and attitudes of others in the group, and are incorporated into common cultural life (Park quoted in Czitrom 1983:116). By the mid-twentieth century Park had established himself as a key communication theorist. During the final years of his life Park worked to understand two ideal types of communication: referential communication, how ideas and facts are communication; and expressive communication, where attitudes and emotions are present. It was in referential communication (e.g. news) that Park felt American life could be improved. In fact, he was rather dismissive of expressive communication (e.g. cinema) labeling it a “subversive cultural influence” (Czitrom 1983:119). Like Dewey, Park recognized that not all communication could liberate and improve the lives of Americans, and both thinkers felt that by utilizing the new capacities of media that facts and ideas could be spread in an effort the achieve that goal.
The final member of this trio of early thinkers is Charles Horton Cooley. Though he had the shortest life of the three (1864-1929) his impact on the matter at hand, symbolic interactionism, was the greatest. Though Dewey maintains status as the most notorious of the bunch, Cooley “developed an earlier and far more extensive social theory of communication than Dewey did” (Simonson 2012:4). Czitrom (1983) suggests that although Cooley had a preference for the type of referential communication previously discussed, and had great faith in the positive, progressive potential of modern communication, that he was unaware of how American media was developing, the trend of corporatizing and that trend’s impact on cultural activities. Against this, Simonson (2012) points out that Cooley identified several types of social power, including a tangible social power that derived from organizing capacity, “which may be described as the ability to build and operate human machinery” (8). Further, Simonson (2012) writes “the capitalist class possesses these and other forms of power, Cooley argues, which range from ‘immediate power over goods and services’ to direct political power, indirect influence over the professional classes and newspapers, and general dominance of the currents of public opinion and sentiment” (8). Thus, rather than understanding Cooley as a theorist that allowed his optimism for the potential of communication blind him to its ills, it appears that he was well aware, and critical, of the way media were used by the capitalist class.
Although Cooley’s contribution to critical understandings of media and power is important, it is for his role in the development of symbolic interactionism that he is most remembered. One of Cooley’s primary concerns was understanding how people are socialized. To understand this, he sought to study persons and society in the imagination. It was from this that his concept of the looking-glass self developed. What this concept described was that throughout the course of its personal development, the self grows and is shaped by the images that other people have of us. Additionally, Cooley developed the concept of the primary group, which was what he used to describe the actual socialization process. Cooley defines the primary group as “those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual’ (quoted in Czitrom 1983:98). Therefore, the self does not grow in isolation, determined biologically, but instead develops with reference to the other members of a society, through the judgements that we feel those other members making against us. Further, it is the primary group of an individual that has the greatest impact on this development of the self. These two concepts are foundational in the development of the symbolic interactionist perspective.
Having elaborated on the history and foundation of symbolic interactionism, it is now possible to examine the perspective itself. Following Dewey, Park, and Cooley, two key theorists are notable for further developing the perspective. First is George Herbert Mead and his understanding of the roles communication plays in social organization. Second is Herbert Blumer and his understanding of the ways humans define and interpret actions rather than merely reacting.
Mead believed, like Cooley, that people are influenced by the attitude that others have about them. It is the “appearance of the other in the self, the identification of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other” (Mead 1934:253) that is required for human social organization. Taking the role of the other allows for social control through self-criticism, which allows for the individual to be integrated into society, or into a particular social group. This self-criticism “is essentially social criticism, and behavior controlled by self-criticism is essentially behavior controlled socially” (Mead 1934:255). Taking the role of the other also allows people the ability to consciously direct their conduct. The organization of society depends on the capacity and ability of its members to consciously direct their conduct and take the attitude of other community members as a whole, rather than just the attitude of a single member – the latter concept is what Mead terms a generalized other. The generalized other can be the anticipated organized set of responses from the society, the community, or an institution, and it is how people are tied to society.
Though Mead recognizes the oppressive potential, and reality, of many institutions he does not believe there is any inevitable reason why they should be so, or why they should be progressive either. He suggests that “social institutions, like individual selves, are developments within, or particular and formalized manifestations of, the social life-process at its human evolutionary level” (Mead 1934:262). Finally, Mead understands society to “represent an organized set of responses to certain situations in which the individual is involved” (270). These responses are developed by taking the role of other members in society, and the individual knows what is appropriate in any given situation because of the ability to take the role of the other.
Herbert Blumer followed up on Mead’s work and coined the term symbolic interaction, for which there are three foundational presuppositions: first, individuals with selves constitute society; second, individual action is built up through taking the role of the other and is not spontaneous; third, group action aligns individual action since the individual takes the role of the other in deciding an action. With these in mind, Blumer writes that symbolic interaction refers:
to the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as it take place between human beings. The peculiarity consists in the fact that human being interpret or ‘define’ each other’s actions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions. Their ‘response’ is not made directly to the actions of one another but instead is based on the meaning which they attach to such actions. Thus human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another’s actions” (Blumer 1969:79).
Blumer points out the importance in realizing that society is comprised of individuals because he feels that “practically all sociological conceptions of human society fail to recognize that the individuals who compose it have selves…” (1969:83). As a consequence, sociologists tend to understand social action as taking place in a particular unit of society, group action/group expression, rather than as the result of individuals “who fit their respective lines of action to one another through a process of interpretation” (Blumer 1969:84) as the symbolic interactionist understands action. Indeed, the symbolic interactionist understands group actions to be the collective action of individuals. So, just as individuals act in regards to a particular situation, groups do the same though it is via the individuals in the group rather than the group having a consciousness of its own. This is important because if the situation is not adequately defined in a single way the members of the group, or the actions of the individual members of the group are not congruent, collective action will be impossible. The implications of this understanding of action and individuality reach far, from politics to social movements. The symbolic interactionist understands “structural features such as ‘culture,’ ‘social systems,’ ‘social stratification,’ or ‘social roles,’ set conditions for their action but do not determine their action” (Blumer 1969:87-88).
Symbolic interactionism can make some important contributions to the understanding of the nature of media power. The perspective would conceptualize the problem of media power by examining the media as important conduits through which individuals can know their world, how individuals develop selves, and against which individual actions can be judged. Walter Lippmann importantly pointed out that the real world is too large for us to know, so we must use fiction to understand it. Therefore, what each person does is based on the pictures in their head rather than on reality proper.
At its core, symbolic interactionism is the perspective that all social happenings are the result of individuals adjusting their action to match the actions of the others. For the symbolic interactionist the media, then, should be of primary importance. While it is true, as Cooley suggested, that the individual develops in reference to how he imagines others picturing him and interpreting his actions, the number of ‘others’ that any individual had to imagine in his time was markedly smaller than the number today, with social networking and various other new media technologies. The power of media for the symbolic interactionist should come from its current status as a core institution in American life. The media give individuals myriad pictures of reality, and many of them are inaccurate. Being a humanist perspective, symbolic interactionism does give ultimate agency to the individual to determine how to interpret, but this does not account for the correct interpretation of an inaccurate picture. The potential for individuals to act incorrectly based on incorrect information increases with media penetration and media inaccuracy.
Understanding that media as an institution operates with a particular social and economic logic should lead the symbolic interactionist to question the impact that media, particularly images, have on the development of self, but also on action. We know the world through the images in our heads, those images are often media representations of real-life events, but ultimately they are fictions. The economic logic of media works to further manipulate and transform events into something easy to consume, sell, etc. If this is true, then the development of the self and the actions individuals take are necessarily distorted, assuming also that the media constitute one of the primary reference groups of the individual.
To understand the problem of media power, the symbolic interactionist might investigate the discrepancies between the representation of an event in the media and how it unfolded in reality. Another question might be “to what degree is one’s self or identity tied to media products, including physical commodities as well as symbolic?” Finally, and most importantly, the symbolic interactionist is not so much interested in the hypothetical impacts of media, but rather the actual impacts, the real, measurable impacts.
In examining the issue of government surveillance programs carried out by the US government, a symbolic interactionist like Herbert Blumer would ask why there is no social or group action being taken to stop it, assuming the surveillance is undesirable. The symbolic interactionist explanation would be that, since group action is actually the unified action of the individuals that comprise the group, there must be an inability to define either the situation or the appropriate action in a single way. Or, perhaps the situation and action is defined in a single way but that the definition is that surveillance is not bad or that no action is the correct action. The next question, which gets more at the power of media, would be to ask either why is this definition unattainable? Or, why is the definition that surveillance is not a problem? In the first case, the symbolic interactionist would understand that the different companies that comprise the media will consider different representations of events to be appropriate, thus contributing to why the individuals might have different pictures in their heads – not everyone consumes the same media. In the second case, homogeneity of media messages can be assumed. To understand inaction, it would be necessary to understand who the individuals in the group are understanding as the generalized other. If it is the media then it is important to examine the messages that are being broadcast. However, no matter what the examination leads to, if the results cannot be empirically verified with the individuals then it is not a course that the symbolic interactionist would pursue. Additionally, the key interest for the perspective as it exists today is collective action (McCall and Becker 2008:9)[2]. If the questions cannot explain the action of the group, they should be reformulated to better meet that end.
[1] John Dewey, Later Works, Volume 11, ed. Boydstrom.
[2] Becker, H. S., & McCall, M. M. (Eds.). (2009). Symbolic interaction and cultural studies. University of Chicago Press.
Becker, H. S., & McCall, M. M. (Eds.). (2009). Symbolic interaction and cultural studies. University of Chicago Press.
Czitrom, D. J. (1982). Media and the American mind: from Morse to McLuhan. Univ of North Carolina Press.
Herbert, B. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. Berkeley (USA): University of California.
Dewey, J. (2008). The later works of John Dewey, Volume 11, 1935-1937. SIU Press.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist.[Edited and with an Introduction by Charles W. Morris]. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 18, 1972.
Simonson, P. (2012). Charles Horton Cooley and the Origins of US Communication Study in Political Economy. Democratic Communiqué, 25(1).
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