Summaries

Abstract

The major difficulty in planning this special issue was to somewhat convincingly define the field of media-cultural communication, long neglected by the discipline of journalism and communication: most importantly by sharpening the notion of culture, then by typifying the contribution of the media to the process of cultural communication, and finally by evaluating the functionality of this contribution as a mechanism to solve and cause problems. Culture is defined as the societal subsystem responsible for the mental structuring of society members, a task it fulfils by generating the models of orientation that guide behavior. Media-communication plays its part in relation to all dimensions of the system of culture. That is to say one has to assume a very dense interaction between the systems of culture and media. The article then discusses the six dimensions that have provided the segmentation principles this volume is structured by. This is done with the articles in view that are subsumed under each of the dimensions: the theory of media-cultural communication, its conditions, its elements, its processes, its institutional formation and its functionality. The final section draws a conclusion and reveals open questions relating to the six dimensions.