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The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 113
same signs and codes (be this critical, negotiated or passive). In this case, for
Morley, the audience, as Nightingale explains, has a kind of ‘dual existence’ –
‘it is part of the mass audience and also part either of subcultural or com-
munal relations with others’ (Nightingale, 1996: 15). Interestingly, Morley
turned away from the audience–text interaction research of ‘Nationwide’,
to look again at audience–medium interaction in later work (see Morley, 1992).
Paralleling such a shift was the attempt to locate the audience. Is the
audience the same as ‘the mass’, or can it only be found in texts? The mass
argument is criticized by theorists like Ang (1996) who argue that the
audience-as-object is an invention of media institutions and corporations.
The entire superstructure of marketing exercises that audiences need to be
‘reached’ is founded on this myth. Audiences are not ready-formed recep-
tacles awaiting to be discovered but are constituted in the same operation
as the audience–text interaction.
Another sense in which audiences are possible without texts is
related to the way the growth of network communication has been accom-
panied by heightened levels of ‘audience participation’. This is especially
evident in the spectacular rise of ‘reality TV’ programmes and spectacle
features – these are examples of unscripted content (see Couldry, 2003:
Chapter 6). Of course they are still social texts in the formulaic way in
which they unfold, but they work much more on the principle of imagi-
nary substitution – the suggestion to audience members that they are see-
ing (a representative of) themselves on the other side of the screen, or at
least can imagine themselves doing whatever is being screened. Once
again we can see how a new genre allows us to reflect on old mediums
that have become acquainted with their ontological power.

The return of medium theory

Man, [McLuhan] understood the internet in the sixties. He was the inter-
net in the sixties. The world’s just finally caught up to him. He was the
internet in the sense he was in touch with the entire globe. … He was
wired long before the editors of Wired magazine were born. This man was
truly wired. (Robert Logan in Benedetti and Dehard, 1997: 171)
In the previous chapter, we discussed the return of McLuhan, who, in
being the most prominent first-generation medium theorist of electronic
broadcast, has enigmatically become the subject of his own prediction –
that theoretically we can view old mediums from the vantage point of the
new, but that at the same time we attach ourselves to new media through
the objects of old media – what he called rear-view mirrorism.
In this chapter, I have suggested that both network and broadcast can
be viewed from the standpoint of each other. This is a corollary of the fact
that I have sought to reject a linear succession model of media forms. In
doing so, broadcast and network communication can be looked at from