Page 105 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 88

88 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
aspects of the commodification of communication. This manifests itself in
four ways: (1) as technologies of urbanization, (2) as technologies of mobile
privatization, (3) by enabling forms of the extension of social relation-
ships, and (4) as agents of interrelated economic processes. When these
continuities are recognized, many of the social and political claims of the
second media age perspective are shaken.

Communication and urbanization

Both broadcast and interactive forms of communication structure, and are
structured by, one common operation – the partitioning of a mass into
atomized units. In this a number of observations of the second media age
theorists about the first media age are most noteworthy. What they
describe as the first media age is charged with the characteristic of inter-
pellation and individuation.
Adorno and Horkheimer (1993) were among the first to provide an
insightful description of this effect of media in their discussion of the ‘cul-
ture industry’. For them, the culture industry corrodes the horizontal net-
works of associations which make up urban self-formation, channelling
populations into individual units, who, once isolated, must reconnect
through what vertical means is offered to them via the mass media. ‘City
housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly
independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more sub-
servient to his adversary’ (30), which for Adorno and Horkheimer is the
power of capitalism to remove individuals from networked means of
cultural production.
For them this process is circular: the more individuals become reliant
on media, the less they are dependent on horizontal networks. The more
abandoned are these networks, the more mass media become their only
source of cultural production. Thus, the entire edifice of mass media
becomes an environment of what has more recently been called ‘path
dependence’. In turn, the need for people to form local attachments to
place is removed, as place is redefined as anywhere within a common
mediascape. The ‘need’ for everyone to stake out their own self-enclosed
unit, preferably on a greenfield site on the fringes of suburban expansion,
rather than adjacent to dwindling inner-urban horizontal networks, is a
frontier expression of media-driven urbanization.
However, this kind of urbanization is usually explained, first, in terms
of redefining individuals as consumers and, secondly, by assigning them
‘identical needs, in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods’.
The organizers of media industries declare such a culture system to be
‘based in the first place on consumer’s needs, and for that reason ... the
technical contrast between the few production centres and the large number
of widely dispersed consumption points ... [is, they claim] accepted with so
little resistance’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993: 31).