Texts-in-dialogues

This paper discusses the process through which cultural ideas, knowledge and beliefs mediating the encounter between an audience and a text are fabricated in and enacted by everyday naturally occurring dialogues. We contend that the cultural knowledge framing any hermeneutic dialogue is communicatively constituted in daily discourses, dialogues and interactions that often concern the texts and text-related practices. By taking a developmental perspective on the role of everyday talk in the making of media ideologies, this paper empirically illustrates how human beings become cultural beings inasmuch as they are inherently dialogic beings. Examples of adult-child interactions collected during ethnographic fieldwork are discussed to illustrate how dialogues occasioned by media use are organized by the worldviews of a given community. Yet, at one and the same time, they (re)produce the value system, moral order and the canonical versions of the world for those who engage in these talking activities.