Page 106 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 89

The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 89
Adorno and Horkheimer’s point is that mass media both produce
media products to satisfy consumer needs as well as produce these needs
to satisfy the culture system of the media. In other words, there is a sense
in which media audiences themselves are turned into commodities – as
consumers who have a use-value for the growth of the culture industry
itself: ‘The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in
which the unity of the system grows ever stronger’ (31).
Thus, media-driven urbanization, which requires the duplication of
innumerable, individual units wherever it operates, breaks up networks
at the same time as it installs a more over-arching form of assimilation
around a ‘few production centres’ of culture. In doing so it even menaces
the extended network possibilities of the telephone. ‘The step from the
telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished roles. The former still
allowed the subject to play the role of subject. ... The latter ... turns all
participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast
programmes’ (31).
Given their predilection for the role function that is offered by the
telephone over radiated media, Adorno and Horkheimer might be
expected to welcome the liberal qualities of the Internet, and the ability of
consumers to interact with previously one-way forms of programming.
However, from an economic and social point of view, the introduction of
a more powerful interactive apparatus in the context of the dominance of
mass media is of an entirely different order than the transition from tele-
phone to radio and television.
Once the social path-dependence on the architectures of radiated media
is in place, interactivity, no matter what form, must be conducted on the
basis of such architecture, and indeed contributes to the daily replication of
such an architecture. This is something which second media age advocates
fail to point out in their claims of the redemptiveness of cyberspace: hori-
zontal unity overcomes the vertical segregation, but also reproduces this
4
segregation. Moreover, also neglected by the second media age theorists is
that the first media age is characterized by a form of separation and unity.
As we saw in Chapter 2, there are many agents through which this occurs,
the image being primary among them – the society of the spectacle.
With Debord (1977), spectacle is a form of reification, a realm in
which direct social relationships are expressed through a totemic system
of images. To the extent that the spectacle ‘concentrates all gazes and all
consciousnesses’ (aphorism 3), the individual only ‘recognizes himself in
the dominant images of need’ (30). The channelling of attention towards
a singular medium is the very basis for segregated individualism. There
is no competing need for horizontal gazes and dialogue, which the spec-
tacle accommodates entirely. Within Debord’s terms, however, it is not
essential that the image becomes the agent of separation/unity; it is just
that in the most intense period of high capitalism’s self-promotion it is a
‘technique’ which serves such a role. The important point is that in late
capitalism social needs require abstract ‘mediation’ in some form: