Page 124 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 107

The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 107
the role of the audience in media events, and the fact that television
programming also provides a context for ‘liveness’. In her essay ‘TV Time
and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television’, Patricia
Mellencamp (1991) argues that the distinctive quality of TV time is not that
it is capable of simultaneity with live events, but that, in a Baudrillardian
sense, it is simultaneous with itself, and other programmes that happen
at the same time. For Mellencamp, when coverage of a catastrophe inter-
rupts the regulated half-hour viewing of daily transmission, the thrill of
interruption produces the very liveness of the event. Instead, the regular-
ity of the scene is menaced by what Baudrillard calls the obscene, which
is the co-product of the graphic, the sensational, which shocks audiences
into the hyperreal. 15
This idea is also found in Dayan and Katz’s analysis of media events
as ‘high holidays’ away from the routine of programming. These events
have a special place themselves in the history of broadcast media in that
their importance has coincided with the globalization of media. What
once captured the attention of a nationwide audience can quickly
progress to worldwide status. But for Dayan and Katz (1992), this need
not be the televising of catastrophe, but such events typically include con-
tests, conquests and coronations – ‘epic contests of politics and sports,
charismatic missions, and the rites of passage of the great’ (401).
What is distinctive in Mellencamp’s analysis is not the relationship
between a media message and an individual viewer, listener or reader, but
the fact that each member of a media audience is aware of the reach and
cross-contextuality of the broadcast, and as such the media event takes on
a power beyond the meaning of the individual messages. 16 Marshall
McLuhan was perhaps one of the most powerful exponents of this quality
of broadcast, which, in his case, was a characteristic of what he viewed to
be auditory culture. It is when information becomes instantaneous and
comes from all directions that it impacts in tribalizing ways. For this
reason the assemblages and information that are possible within even
visual electronic media and genres like newspapers are in fact ‘aural’, in
McLuhan’s terms. Newspapers, which graphically arrange information in
a non-linear fashion, are in fact, in McLuhan’s sensorial ontology, based on
the medium of the ear and its sensitivity to media which surround their
audiences with a presence and range of extension not equalled by visual
media (see McLuhan, 1964). 17
The duration of a broadcast itself constitutes an event that is quite
independent of the fact that its content may not have been produced at
the same time. Electronic broadcast immediately qualifies for this effect,
whereas newspapers qualify in a more limited sense. For the day of a
newspaper’s production it remains an event; indeed, Hegel once
described it as the ‘morning prayer’ of modernity: ‘The newspaper,
Benedict Anderson says, is a “one day bestseller”. Nobody reads last
week’s newspaper, unless they find it wrapped round potatoes in the
kitchen. But everyday it sells out in millions’ (Inglis, 1993: 29).