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138 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
that whilst these interactive forms differ, they have in common the fact
that they are both viewed as a mediation of face-to-face interaction and that
from this standpoint the term ‘disintermediation’ is flawed. There is no
reason why, within the logocentric framework of ‘mediation’ theory,
using submedia of the Internet, for example, is any less ‘mediated’ than
watching television.
However, as we shall see, whilst it is erroneous to classify either
network or broadcast dynamics as either more or less ‘mediated’, the con-
ceptualization of mediation itself must be emancipated from the transmission
model. Thompson’s model also sits firmly within the communication-as-
transport paradigm of communication – a transmission-based model in
which the face-to-face is the base and is mediated by an architecture that
extends it in some way.

The problem with ‘mediation’

Thompson’s model is useful in the way it summarizes the background
theoretical architecture that is drawn on by many of those attempting to
theorize old and new media. For example, the ‘cues-filtered-out’ approach
is easier to understand in this comparative typology of media forms.
Nearly all of the cyberspace literature is framed by a social interaction
model – i.e. that face-to-face interaction is being supplanted by extended
forms of communication – and this is seen to be derived from technology
somehow intervening and separating us from some ‘natural state’ of inter-
action which is the face-to-face.
More useful still in Thompson’s typology is the way in which it takes
the interaction model to its outer limit. And the limit of this model is pre-
cisely the question of communicative context. We can recall Thompson’s
claim that ‘the participants in mediated interaction are located in contexts which
are spatially and/or temporally distinct’. A number of observations can be
made here:

• What is assumed in this statement is that the communicative context
which is to be privileged over all others is the ‘local’, ‘embodied’ con-
text capable of mutual presence, which is separated from other such
‘local’ contexts.
• The task of communication is to overcome such separation by the
transmission of symbolic forms.
• Interactants have some measure of control in overcoming this separa-
tion of contexts by actively adding specific cues that are otherwise
structurally absent.

Mediation theory is a variant of instrumental theory, discussed above.
Instead of an interactant simply using a medium to convey a message, the