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The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 109
This latter quality is central to understanding broadcast. The
performativity of broadcast derives not merely from its ‘live’ quality but
also from the fact that it can technically extend speech events to an almost
unlimited audience. When the news presenter says that ‘the world is in
shock’ because of the death of a member of the British royal family, there
is a sense in which this utterance is the event, more so than the actual
death. Of course, the utterance may rest on the truth of a state of affairs,
but what is never in dispute is that, at a certain hour, such a statement was
made to the world. When we are told the world is in shock, we, as audi-
ence members, are immediately enveloped by such an utterance, regard-
less of our attachment to the deceased royal. We may as well be in shock
in the sense of consummating what is likely to be the common state of all
audience members. The outpouring of mourning for Princess Diana was
almost entirely an effect of the powerful performativity of media. 18
Similarly, recall from Chapter 2 the widespread panic over a Martian
invasion as a result of Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the
Worlds. As a novel, H.G. Wells’ book could never have the same effect
precisely because it lacked the synchronous audience which electronic
broadcast and newspapers provide. Similarly, extended-interactive
communication can never constitute an event as broadcast does. Indeed
broadcast can be the event. This is particularly salient with broadcasted
mega-news, which takes on an historical status far more powerful than
any pre-broadcast events would ever allow.

The audio-visually documented assassination of John F. Kennedy levitated
him and his presidency into an historiographical mythosphere once occupied
only by the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. By contrast, William
McKinley never had a chance. The O.J. Simpson trial is assured a place in
the popular history of the twentieth-century American jurisprudence that few,
if any, Supreme Court rulings might hope to occupy; Judge Ito has already
eclipsed Oilver Wendell Holmes in recognition factor. Father Coughlin will
have generated far more usable material than Pope John XXIII, and Billy
Graham more than both. Who is likely to be a more dominant presence in
the digital archives? Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan? Dr Freud or Dr Ruth?
Charles Darwin or Pat Robertson? Mother Teresa already has a higher
F-Score than Albert Schweitzer. In the future the past will belong to the audio-
visually reproducible. The giants of the arts and sciences who, for whatever
reason, failed to climb the transmission towers of the twentieth century can
expect to be remaindered to the specialists’ bin. (Marc, 2000: 630)

Marc argues that it was the culture of broadcasting that made Elvis and
the Beatles possible: ‘They emerged from the night spots of Memphis and
Hamburg to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. In the cable environment,
however, The Ed Sullivan Show is no longer possible’ (630).
The foregoing examples serve to show that broadcast and network
communication are ontologically distinct – a distinction which has numer-
ous consequences for the kind of telecommunities that technologically