Page 102 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 85

The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 85
Moreover, culturally, the ‘control society’ age of broadcast is said to be fast
disappearing. Audiences will not tolerate such subjection when they can
be producers. According to the theory, they will rapidly abandon broad-
cast as a source of information and entertainment. Or if they remain loyal
to broadcast, they choose reality TV, where they can see themselves in the
production, rather than obey the mass-produced artifices of the culture
industry.
However, from the historical vantage point of over a decade of the
Internet, we can see how, empirically, this has not proved to be over-
whelmingly true. Internet use in many of the most information-rich
countries with high media densities began to slow in 1999. At the same
time, as various studies indicate, attachment to broadcast forms of media
did not show any significant decline (see, e.g., Castells, 2001; Schultz,
2000: 208). Furthermore, it is empirically the case that, when websites
begin to charge fees for information that is otherwise free to air, net users
rapidly abandon them.
The fact that the Internet as a communicative technology has not
signalled a demise of radio, TV, newspapers or other broadcast media in
information societies is tied to the fact that broadcast and network tech-
nologies are, as we shall see, mutually constitutive. Moreover, it reveals the
fallacy of the technological determinism inherent in the first and second
media age distinction and the way in which the heralding of a second
media age is often represented as a linear eclipse of the broadcast era.
At the core of the distinction between first and second media age is the
idea that an historical era, defined by its media, can so closely correspond
to a small number of technological forms. In the context of the current dis-
tinction, the fallacy inheres in reducing ‘interactivity’ and ‘broadcast’ to a
function of technology itself.
As was argued in Chapter 1, neither broadcast nor interactivity needs
to be technologically extended in order for its distinctive political, social
and economic properties to be realized. For example, reciprocal commu-
nication is inherent to a range of technological forms, from face-to-face, to
telephone and writing. From different perspectives, numerous surveys of
the history of communications show how broadcast has had a systemic
form which is as old as human society itself (see Feather, 2000; Innis,
1972; Jowett, 1981; Thompson, 1995; Williams, 1974, 1981). For Raymond
Williams (1974), the social basis of broadcasting long preceded its
mechanical and electronic forms:

The true basis of this system had preceded the developments in technology.
Then as now there was a major, indeed dominant, area of social communi-
cation, by word of mouth, within every kind of social group. In addition, then
as now, there were specific institutions of that kind of communication which
involves or is predicated on social teaching and control: churches, school,
assemblies and proclamations, direction in places of work. All these inter-
acted with forms of communication within the family. (21)