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Interaction versus Integration 139
meaning of the message will be affected by a range of factors that come to
mediate its successful transmission. However, intentionality may be pre-
served insofar as the interactant understands the medium and is able to
make allowances for such mediation in crafting a particular message.
Thus, for example, journalists learn how to ‘write across’ different media.
In this way, interactants are seen to ‘metaphorically’ extend what they
may be accustomed to in face-to-face interaction. This is because they
inevitably project the qualities of face-to-face communication onto the
extended forms.
However, this description of mediated interaction assumes either
that the ‘local context’ of interlocutors in technologically extended com-
munication is already known (be this mutually or otherwise) or at least
that it is in part disclosed in the communication process. The interlocutors
are deemed not to have an identity outside of what is known of their local
context. The local context gives them their identity. They may venture out
of it and communicate with others across time and space, but they do
so anchored in their context of origin, and are said to be identified in
this way.
To return to Table 5.2 once more, we can see how mediated and
quasi-mediated forms of interaction are seen to be continuations of the
face-to-face by other means. The qualities listed beside these forms are in
terms of what is replicated from the face-to-face, of what is absent.
Thompson does not, however, add what is unique to technologically
extended media which are absent in the face-to-face. Thus, for example,
under mediated interaction, he could add the fact that print is capable of
information storage, or, in the quasi-mediated interaction list, the fact that
broadcast communication is synchronous between large audiences, some-
thing unachievable in mutual presence.
However, technologically extended communication, whilst annulling
some of the features of phonocentric communication, also adds qualities
which are not possible within such communicative events. The technical
apparatuses of communication mediums can produce sounds not gener-
ated by the human voice, text too difficult to produce in the course of ordi-
nary dialogue, as well as images beyond merely the image of the person
engaged in interaction. These qualities, which Meyrowitz identifies (see
previous chapter), can be thought of as providing the resources of an
entirely different register of communication ‘language’ – the arrangement
of images, camera angles, fades, echoes, sound-mixing genres, textual
conventions and styles, etc. The way that producers and consumers of
such images, music and text relate to them will vary considerably.
However, despite this, all interlocutors appreciate that the meaning of
messages in these mediums is to some degree shaped by the medium.
In such cases, the idea that the face-to-face is simply mediated begins
to collapse as it is realized that technologically constituted mediums bring
about new contexts of a substantially different order than can contexts capa-
ble of mutual presence. To insist that there exists a separation of contexts