Writers in this tradition often trace their heritage, in part, to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life and to the argument stated elsewhere that “society substitutes for the world revealed to our senses a different world that is a projection of the ideals created by the community” (1953: 95). This projection of community ideals and their embodiment in material form—dance, plays, architecture, news stories, strings of speech—creates an artificial though nonetheless real symbolic order that operates to provide not information but confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds but to represent an underlying order of things, not to perform functions but to manifest an ongoing and fragile social process.

James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: E…, loc. 89126