Cultural dialog conceived as media dialog

Abstract

When cultures or social groups interact through media, they explicitly or implicitly impose preconditions of their world understanding and of their life-world practice upon each other. Therefore, such interaction is always potentially polemogenic. At the same time, however, it is exactly by virtue of such interactions, that the hidden presuppositions of one’s own understanding and practice may surface. In particular, this is the case when objects, ideas, or media travel from one culture to another – and thereby get recontexualized and recontexualize the new surrounding. Sometimes, then, a practice that was working well in the original context unexpectedly fails in a new context or at least fails to bring the same results or changes its function completely by being embedded in different forms of practice. This article starts with an in-depth case study of such object- and media-related cultural misunderstanding, in order to then tie some media-theoretical considerations up to this example. On the basis of this exercise we unfold a praxeological understanding which considerably departs from common sense and opens new methodological horizons for understanding cultural encounters.