Trim Size: 170mm x 244mm Roessler wbieme0021.tex V1 - June 4, 2016 3:26 P.M. Page 1 Media Use as Social Action LEON SALTER and SHIV GANESH Massey University, New Zealand he phrase media use as social action can be understood in a dual sense. On one hand, it refers to the use of media to achieve predetermined political and/or social objectives. On the other, it implies that the very act of using media has communicative consequences that contribute to the founding of new genres of social action, and even the formation of new social action ields. In other words, in the latter sense, media use is social action. his understanding of media use has become more widespread since the 1990s, which have witnessed a global explosion of access to media production and its communication through digital communication technologies, access that was previously prohibitively expensive. his entry considers both senses of the phrase, providing a historical as well as a multiparadigmatic view of media use as social action. Media use for social action Dominant theoretical models on media use as social action during the twentieth cen- tury were chiely inluenced by what is called the strong efects paradigm: theories of pro- paganda and persuasive communication and critical Marxist approaches. In this view, media use for social action were constituted as a form of social control, where media communications were seen as a vertical, one-way process aiming to achieve social goals through predictable and intentional efects on populations. Media themselves were per- ceived as either a value-free conduit of information or unescapably embedded with cap- italist logics of production. However, this rather narrow conception of media use cen- tered on intended efects was already being undermined by the middle of the twentieth century by the limited efects model, and then came under more sustained attack from critical turns in development communication theory and alternative media theory. Critical Marxist approaches Marx regarded technology as integral to capitalism and therefore embedded with its logics of eiciency and mass production. While not quite a technological determin- ist, Marx was an economic determinist and materialist, in that he believed that the class that has control over material production will also control the realm of mental representation, or ideology. Critical Marxist scholars in the early to mid-twentieth cen- tury, such as the Frankfurt School, were highly suspicious of the rise of cinema, radio, and the culture industries, viewing them as reproducing bourgeois values on a sys- temic scale not seen before. Art, cultural diversity, and political debate were viewed he International Encyclopedia of Media Efects. Patrick Rössler (Editor-in-Chief), Cynthia A. Hofner and Liesbet van Zoonen (Associate Editors). © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.