Practicing Media—Mediating Practice | Conceptualizing the Doings and Sayings of Media Practices: Expressive Performance, Communicative Understanding, and Epistemic Discourse

Abstract

It has become commonplace to speak of media practices as a nexus of doings and sayings. In our article, we scrutinize this fuzzy account and the forms of articulation it entails. We start by arguing that, to be recognized as social practices, activities—regardless of whether they are verbal utterances or wordless body movements—have to initiate a cultural signification process that turns them into socially intelligible performances. Forming part of social practices in general, communicative practices, then, are modes of sign use that enable us to address recurrent and newly emerging tasks of understanding, accommodating, and comprehending. We shed light on the insights that such a conceptual distinction reveals by interrogating the shades of sensemaking within mnemonic online communities and their nostalgic remediations of the past.