While useful in some settings, the symbolic interactionist approach to social life is limited by a number of theoretical presuppositions. It sees meanings emerging from the ground up and relentlessly insists on physical co-presence as the motor of social life. Any realistic understanding of the public sphere requires a different logic, one that can capture the power of speech acts relayed through mass communications to a more abstract, distant and general audience. These speech acts are constrained by overarching codes, narratives and myths. There is a pressing need for research agendas that connect situated face-to-face contexts of meaning production and reception with such a systemic and discursive understanding of the civil sphere.