This challenging book offers a broad-ranging, innovative framework for understanding the role of mass media in the social production of meaning.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen draws on classic positions on the relations between communications and society [and on recent work in both social sciences and humanities - don't edit this!] In particular, he brings together the traditions of semiotic research on media content, image and discourse with current communication research on the audience as an active participant in the interpretation of mediated messages. Building on a range of traditions in media and cultural studies, he outlines the basis for an integrative, social-semiotic theory of mass communication.

Underlying the author's argument is a reappraisal of the elements of mass communication theory and their relation to the broader concerns of social theory and epistemology in communication research. He argues for a renewal of the pragmatism and semiotics originating from the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce as a comprehensive approach to relating signs, self and society. The potential of such an approach is illustrated by examples of how a pragmatist semiotics can be applied in actual media research.

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'An original and thought-provoking application of the neglected tradition of Peircean semiotics to the systematic study of media reception' - David Morley, Reader in Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London