Page 11 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

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PREFACE

A theory of communication must be developed in the realm of abstraction. Given
that physics has taken this step in the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics,
abstraction should not be in itself an objection.
N. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 12

What follows is an interdisciplinary communication theory book which
sets out the implications of new communications technologies for media
studies and the sociology of communication.
The cluster of texts which came out over the last decade dealing with
computer-mediated communication (CMC), virtual reality and cyberspace
has significantly established new theoretical domains of research which
have been accepted across a range of disciplines. The current book proposes
to integrate this literature in outline and summary form into the corpus of
communication studies. In doing so it explores the relationship between
media, technology and society. How do media, in their various forms,
extend the social, reproduce the social, or substitute for other aspects of
social life?
Most books dealing with communication and media studies invari-
ably address traditional concerns of content, representation, semiotics
and ideology. Whilst including an appreciation of these approaches, the
current book makes a contribution to theoretical analysis of media and
communications by charting how the emergence of new post-broadcast
and interactive forms of communication has provided additional domains
of study for communication theory, renovated the older domain of broad-
cast, and suggested fresh ways of studying these older media.
In doing so, this book advances a critique of the ‘second media age’
thesis, which, I argue, has become something of an orthodoxy in much
recent literature. It rejects the historical proposition that a second media
age of new media, exemplified by the Internet, has overtaken or converged
with an older age of broadcast media. Yet at the same time, the value of
analytically distinguishing between the most significant architecture that
is attributed to the first media age – broadcast – and that which is attrib-
uted to the second media age – interactive networks – is upheld. The basic
dualism between broadcast and interactivity structures the main themes of
the book. To the extent that individuals in media societies experience
changes in the means of communication as a ‘second media age’, we are
compelled to re-examine the postulated ‘first media age’ in terms of