Page 115 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 98

98 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
deferring to Innis as the classic exponent of this view, that ‘[t]elevision
makes it possible to generate vast publics, attuned simultaneously to the
same message; the telephone makes it possible to coordinate personal
connections, exchanging particular and self-generated messages’ (23).
Wark sees these two technologies as providing a basis for different kinds
of ‘culture’, which for him inhere in the messages rather than the mediums
they allow: ‘Through the television and telephone, quite different kinds of
culture coalesce; one based on normative and majoritarian messages; the
other at least potentially enabling the formation of marginal and minority
culture’ (23–4). In Wark’s analysis, it is the dynamic between ‘mainstream’
and minority that is reproduced in these two technologies, a dualism that
is in fact at the heart of second media age politics, from the visions of
Apple users in the 1960s to the current utopian hopes of using the Net for
peace and global protest against ‘the system’ (see Terranova, 2001).
Wark’s discussion is a useful departure from succession models of
media. He argues that there are at least two kinds of cultural productions
arising from different media forms, and that these can co-exist in tension.
He is clearly not arguing that television’s ‘mainstream’ is progressively
undermined by increased telephony or any other medium which makes it
possible to coordinate personal connections, exchanging particular and
self-generated messages.
What Wark avoids, in this discussion at least, is choosing technolo-
gies which are marked by considerable historical separation: TV versus
Internet, cinema versus interactive television, etc. By appreciating a
co-presence of communicative technologies and the social or cultural
dynamics they produce, the historical distinction is weakened. Instead, it
becomes necessary to appreciate the way in which ‘interactive’ and
‘broadcast’ forms of communication carry different kinds of social bond.
These two kinds of social bond are mutually co-dependent as well as, in
the current era, carried much more heavily by technological extension. It
is this increased degree of extension which, it might be argued, could
qualify as a second media age, much more than the predominance of
interactivity over broadcast. If anything, technologically extended inter-
activity has not eclipsed broadcast; it has merely provided everyday
forms of interaction with increased alternatives.
As carriers of integration, broadcast and the Internet can broadly be
described in terms of the predominance of mediated forms of either
recognition or reciprocity. Both processes, collective recognition and
extended reciprocity, carry with them modes of integration of persons
which, as our discussion of mobile privatization suggests, prioritize the
relationship of individuals to an ‘outside’ on the basis of commoditized
social relationships.
In this, it can be argued, it is impossible to adequately understand the
extended reciprocity of network communication without understand-
ing the social dynamics of broadcast communication. As we have seen,
mediums of broadcast integration provide the socio-spatial as well as the