Christian Pentzold

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, in order 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 such a conceptual distinction reveals by interrogating the shades of sensemaking within mnemonic online communities and their nostalgic remediations of the past. Read the full OA article here