Page 116 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 99

The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 99
ideological preconditions of virtual communities. Broadcast communication,
in establishing, as Adorno and Horkheimer show, a horizontal cellular
architecture which can only be integrated via mass media, has heightened
the dependence individuals have on those media, or on whatever hori-
zontal means of communication that can break down the tele-mediated
fields which divide each adjacent unit from the next.
In this connection, the notable decline in extended families and face-
to-face neighbourhood kinds of networks corresponds inversely to the
rise of ‘metro-nucleation’. As Geoff Sharp points out, many years ago, in
Family and Social Network, Elizabeth Bott (1971) clearly demonstrated
the transition to a later modern mode of integration in which the recon-
struction of the material habitat contributed to the increased segregation
of the institutional settings of everyday life (Sharp, 1993: 236). To quote
McLuhan and Fiore: ‘The family circle has widened. The worldpool of
information fathered by electric media – movies, Telstar, flight – far sur-
passes any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear.
Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts.
Now all the world’s a sage’ (in McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 14). Indeed the
family circle has widened, but not before it has also shrunk – a contraction
of embodied wide-kinship networks which then find substitution in the
global openness of electronic media of all kinds.
However, whilst this dual operation of expansion and contraction
wrought by broadcast media has increased the ability to identify with far
greater numbers of other persons than was possible in pre-media soci-
eties, it has also dramatically reduced the daily physical interaction with
such others. Such re-territorialization of social architectures of identifica-
tion creates heightened, almost religious, attachment to extended media
(see Martin-Barbero, 1997), which is inversely related to widespread
breakdown of families as a basis for social capital in media societies (see
Fukuyama, 1999). As face-to-face familial and ‘local’ associations with others
become overpassed, in the manner of an inter-suburban freeway, interac-
tion increasingly becomes confined to a level of association which has an
abstractness which is somehow adequate to the technically mediated
bond which abolished its local expressions – broadcast. As the embodied
public sphere is replaced by an electronic public sphere, to ‘go out’, as
McLuhan once remarked, is to be alone (cited in Levinson, 1999: 134). And
when we are out, he noted, our interactions become more violent, insofar
as we have been stripped of readily available roles. Road rage (Lupton,
1999), street rage, telephone rage, even air rage, become more common.
Insofar as, McLuhan argues, the medium is our identity, when we turn off
the Internet we lose the role it assigns to us as a netizen, and we are forced
to take responsibility for our identity.
When we are immersed in the comfort of electronic media, on the
other hand, we are able to foster new types of shared experience, result-
ing in ‘greater personal involvement with those who would otherwise be
strangers’ (Meyrowitz, 1995: 58). However, the mobile privatization side