Table Of ContentThe Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life
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Volume 224
The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life
Edited by Ruth Ayaß and Cornelia Gerhardt
The Appropriation of Media
in Everyday Life
Edited by
Ruth Ayaß
University of Klagenfurt
Cornelia Gerhardt
Saarland University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The appropriation of media in everyday life / edited by Ruth Ayaß, Cornelia Gerhardt.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 224)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mass media and language. 2. Discourse analysis. 3. Conversation analysis. I. Ayaß,
Ruth. II. Gerhardt, Cornelia.
P96.L34A68 2012
302.23--dc23 2012023014
isbn 978 90 272 5629 4 (Hb ; alk. paper)
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Media appropriation and everyday life 1
Ruth Ayaß
Overview of the volume 17
Cornelia Gerhardt
part i: Patterns of television reception
Communicative activities during the television reception: General
and genre specific structures of recipients’ talk 23
Ruth Ayaß
Notability: The construction of current events in talk-in-interaction 47
Cornelia Gerhardt
Intertextual quotation: References to media in family interaction 79
Kristy Beers Fägersten
part ii: The reception of media genres
Watching out loud: A television quiz show as a resource
in family interaction 107
Alla V. Tovares
The construction of audience community via answering machine:
The case of the French radio broadcast Là-bas, si j’y suis 131
Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre
‘I wanna become a real rock star’: Para-social interactions of German
adolescent girls with television talent shows 161
Janet Spreckels
part iii: Mediated worlds
Organising participation in video gaming activities 197
Arja Piirainen-Marsh
Coordinating action and talk-in-interaction in and out of video games 231
Lorenza Mondada
vi The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life
Appropriating new media: The implementation of technical landmarks
in emergency settings 271
Stephan Habscheid & Jan Gerwinski
Index 305
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sandra Inzko, Mira Wagner and Elena Wecker, who proof-
read the manuscript meticulously and checked quotations and references. With
regards to the indexing we thank Daniel Recktenwald and Ian Schwarz for their
work. Our thanks also go to Carmen Tomantschger for handling the lay-out of
the papers, especially the transcriptions, with great care. We would also like to
thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Furthermore, we are
grateful to Anita Fetzer, series editor of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, and Isja
Conen, Benjamins acquisition editor, for their support. Foremost, we would like
to express our gratitude to Claudia Isep, who assisted us steadfastly throughout the
whole reviewing and editing process.
Ruth Ayaß & Cornelia Gerhardt
Introduction
Media appropriation and everyday life
Ruth Ayaß
University of Klagenfurt
1. Introduction1
Already at a very early stage, there was evidence that media do not simply take
effect; but that they are rather appropriated, and in their interpretation a major
role is played not only by the recipient himself, but also by his co-recipients and
the communication amongst them. An early example, which arguably counts
among the most impressive until today, is found in Lazarsfeld’s, Berelson’s, and
Gaudet’s empirical milestone “The People’s Choice” (1944). Within a wide-scale
panel, it sought to examine the election propaganda d uring the American presi-
dential campaign. Despite the deductive analytic design, which was explicitly
founded on effectiveness of the stimulus-response model, mass-media propa-
ganda was found to have but a marginal effect. What had the utmost influence on
the electoral behavior was, in fact, the voters’ family backgrounds and, effectually,
the situation of reception (and its communicative post-processing), comparable
in its effect to a “magnetic force” (ibid.: 141). In consequence, it was actually face-
to-face contact which had the greatest significance (ibid.: 157). These “molecular
pressures” (ibid.: 152) had occasionally quite simple consequences; for instance,
one first-time voter, when asked about the reason for favoring the D emocrat can-
didate, stated that his grandfather will skin him if he doesn’t (ibid.: 158).
However, these very forms of communicative media appropriation had long
been neglected. Over recent years there has been a change in this respect: there is,
at present, a growing number of studies devoted to everyday forms and patterns of
actual appropriation. This volume unites empirical examinations of mass-media
appropriation operating through Discourse and Conversation Analysis and based
on audio (visual) recordings of concrete everyday interaction.
1. I am indebted to Ruben Bieker, Saarbrücken, for his accurate translation of this text.
