Page 109 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

over ever-greater distances. The electronic media of communication are the latest
forms through which this disembedded interaction takes place.
The particular significance of the modern mass media, Giddens argues, lies in the
specific ways that they pattern and transmit knowledge. He argues, first, that the
mass media construct reality through what he calls a ‘collage effect’. Events are dis-
embedded from their context for reporting alongside a whole series of otherwise
unconnected events in a newspaper or television news bulletin. At the same time, the
news is presented alongside other articles and programmes (sport, entertainment,
advertising, etc.) in a similar collage of events and images. The second feature of the
mass media that he emphasizes is the intrusion of distant events into everyday con-
sciousness that they make possible. More and more of the experiences that people
have depend not on their own local and personal knowledge, but on mass media rep-
resentations of distant events. They experience the world in mediated form, and this
form of mediation involves the collage effect. Giddens here echoes the arguments of
Baudrillard (1981) concerning the mediated character of contemporary culture. Mass
media images are central to the social imagination, and the social reality in which
people live becomes a hyperreal cultural formation.
Giddens’ view of the mass media has been spelled out by John Thompson (1995),
though his views should certainly not be identified with those of Giddens. According
to Thompson, interaction takes the form of ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ whenever
it depends on mass communications. That is, communications are not oriented
towards specific others but are broadcast to an indefinite audience and in a predom-
inantly monological (one-way) form. The mass media offer little possibility for dia-
logical interaction with their audiences. In mediated quasi-interaction, there can be
no reflexive monitoring of the actions of others.

Culture and Reflexivity in Late Modernity

Giddens’ explorations into modernity have raised questions about the forms of social
life that may develop out of modernity. It is in his consideration of late modernity
that Giddens gives the greatest attention to the cultural systems of the lifeworld. His
conception of culture as ‘structure’ underpins everything that he has written on
modernity, but his account of modern culture is less well developed than his account
of capitalism and the nation–state. In turning to those trends that he sees as mark-
ing the new stage of late modernity, however, he examines in great depth the forms
of reflexivity that characterize the late modern lifeworld.
These questions have often been discussed in terms of a contemporary stage of
postmodernity, but Giddens is sceptical about such claims. He recognizes, however,
that there have been far-reaching changes in the structure of modernity in the
contemporary world, and he conceptualizes these changes as aspects of a period of
late modernity. In late modernity, all the principal institutional elements of moder-
nity have been ‘radicalized’, eliminating virtually all the remaining features of pre-
modernity and traditionalism and starkly exposing modernity in all its formally

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