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The concept of "generalized symbolic media of social interaction" was introduced by Parsons five years ago in his two articles on the concepts of power and influence.1 I believe that it represents a theoretical development of the first importance, which has received much less attention—particularly in my own field of social anthropology—than it deserves. The purpose of the present paper is to review and criticize the concept itself and to point out its relevance to certain problems in social anthropology.

In order to analyse "person-to-person" involvement in mass media content between an audience member and a "media personality," the concept of media interaction, which implies that the audience member experiences "interaction" with, and in many cases identifies with persons in the media content, was defined, operationalized and used in an empirical study. Guiding the empirical analysis was a model of individual mass media use which brings together: (1) those social/psychological structures that affect need fulfillment possibilities, relating these to (2) mass media exposure, and (3) media interaction, and ending with (4) some consequences of the latter. The results shown how media interaction can be related to certain characteristics of the audience member's individual and social situation as well as to certain patterns regarding consumption of various types of media fare. The results also indicate that media interaction may possibly lead to increased dependency on the mass media as well as to tendencies to use the media, as opposed to other sources of "company," at times of loneliness.

The idea that measures of mass media content might complement survey research in monitoring social change is as old as public opinion polling itself. This article argues for social indicators to parallel economic indicators based on media content. Developed here is one such indicator, the "Green field Index" of Readers' Guide entries. Usefulness of such an index is argued in terms of recent findings on the "agenda-setting" function of the media, which imply that public attitudes and opinions may be more closely correlated with media coverage than with more objective social conditions. This is illustrated with four separate measures of the "drug problem" among American youth in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which suggest that media indicators are as good as objective measures and poll data for monitoring change. Usefulness of the Greenfield Index is demonstrated in two applications: (1) to decomposition of the issue of race relations into more subtle component shifts in media attention, and (2) the exposure of media coverage of crime and criminal activity as subject to the periodic cycles that characterize fads. Linked to more objective measures and public opinion surveys, media indicators like the Greenfield Index afford relatively inexpensive means to assess social change at the macro level.