Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction

This study combines media studies and social interactionalist discursive research on the news media, and bridges the gap between the analyses of texts and their production, and studies of audience reception and behaviour. On one hand media studies need interactional sociolinguistics to open up to more reflective studies of media audiences. At the same time, interactional sociolinguistics needs media studies to enrich its understanding of the ever-increasing place of texts of the media in daily social interactions. The study is based on five years of ethnogrphic and discursive study of the role of the news media (print and television) in the social construction of identity.