Cultures of War. News Media and Symbolic Violence
The problems of systematic and objective quantification of violent content and its reach over audiences reveal the inherent limitations of studying reception processes from an informational perspective, by virtue of a reading that is overly focused — either by excess or by default — on the reactive dimension of audiences. The scarcity of significant results along this line has not, however, served to reconsider the dominant research approach in communication. Even today, an excessively functional and positivist research culture prevails in the academic field, one that avoids trying to understand the meaning of media violence from the totality of cultural practices and the specific historical-social context in which the process of spectacular representation takes place and becomes meaningful. (Excerpt from the foreword).