Sociological Understanding of Media

Since it is difficult to overestimate the importance of media, a sociological perspective helps us locate the media in a wider social context, which allows us to explore how it relates to other actors and social institutions and what its relationships with various institutions and the public look like.

Structure and agency concepts are crucial to understanding the sociological approach to media. Structure "describes any recurring pattern of social behavior" (Croteau et al., 2022, p. 14). There are various forms of social structure, such as

• the family,
• school,
• religious bodies,
• friendship circles,
• athletic teams,
• support groups,
• employees, and
• a community.

These structures contribute to our identities and to the purposes for which we use media. According to Croteau, Hoynes, and Childress (2022), sociologists and social science scholars explain structure alongside human agency because agency is believed to influence the social structure and reinforce one model of communication media over another, depending on the situation.

Essentially, these concepts help explain three major relationships in the media system:

• relationships within the media industry (the internal workings of mass media organizations and processes of socialization),
• relationships between the media and other institutions (the social, economic, and political systems within which the media exists and operates), and
• relationships between the media and the public (how media technology impacts users and how the users influence content production and the media industry).