Culture: Text or Artifact or Action?

This article reflects on problems in defining and operationalizing the term culture. Most media scholars interested in cultural studies and most cultural studies scholars define culture as a whole way of life and then operationalize the study of culture as the analysis of texts. This reduction of a whole way of living, being, and doing in the world to reading texts has methodological benefits, but it obscures experiential differences that mark the processes of encoding and decoding artifacts, differences between types of artifacts, and experiential and economic differences in access to the technology necessary to gain exposure to specific artifacts. Furthermore, as the language of this abstract suggests, the reduction tends to eliminate human beings from discussions about texts and culture. Perhaps we need to theorize culture in a way that recognizes human beings as well as texts.