Page 12 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

INTRODUCTION

Why the Communication Age?

James Lull

To describe the spectacular nature of what’s happening today as the ‘Informa-
tion Age’, the ‘Digital Age’, or the ‘Internet Age’ takes most of the life out of this
exciting era and puts the analytical emphasis in the wrong place. No doubt we
live with much more information now than ever before; lots of that informa-
tion comes to us in digital form; and the Internet has certainly become an
indispensable resource. But for what?
Symbolic exchanges facilitated by high technology and the new networks
of ‘complex connectivity’ in place today (Tomlinson 1999) are contemporary
elaborations of what is really a very basic activity – human communication.
Although information technologies have greatly accelerated and altered
some of the ways human beings communicate with each other, motivations
behind the signifying practices that people create in order to construct their
social and cultural worlds remain fundamentally unchanged. High-
technology jargon unfortunately often detracts from the vital and complex
processes that motivate and manifest communication, as it dehumanizes one
of life’s most fundamental undertakings. Compounding the problem, the
technocratic language of the current period generally privileges the rational
side of communicative interaction. We might easily get the impression
nowadays that imperfect, real human contact has somehow transmogrified
into seamless robotic conversations with databanks located somewhere in
cyberspace.
The expression ‘Communication Age’ serves as an umbrella term that can
be used to broaden, humanize, and make more accurate a description and
interpretation of the exciting new era. The Communication Age refers not
only to the efficient transmission of digitized bits and bytes from here to there,
but also to the significance that communication processes hold for real people
as they engage the entire range of material and symbolic resources at their
disposal. Those resources include not only the tele-mediated and computer-
mediated symbolic forms that get so much attention these days, but the whole

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