Despite an abundance of twists and turns, the road paved with literature on mass media continues to lead to one of two places: to a place where media are assumed to be powerful relative to audience members, or to a place where the opposite view is held to be true. At the former place, scholars argue that media are successful at injecting hegemonic ideas directly into the minds of rather passive audience members (cf. Adorno 1991), or that any audience opposition to specific ideas is in the long run overwhelmed by immersion in a world shaped by dominant ideologies (cf. Althusser 1971). At the latter place, scholars counter that audience members are active interpreters who often overlook or consciously subvert the meanings intended by the creators of media texts (Klapper 1960; Blumler and Katz 1974; Fiske 1987). At stake in this ongoing debate, of course, is our understanding of the degree to which media actually construct “reality.”

As Carey (1975) notes in the above quote, what we perceive as “reality” is shaped by an ongoing process of human communication. The ritualistic nature of this process ultimately points to the precariousness of “reality,” the degree to which its coordinates must continually be negotiated and (re)affirmed.