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Interaction versus Integration 145
they operate as a reserve for processing information. The individual
consumption of media may be unpredictable and anonymous, but as a
system, everyone can relate to it with ease.
Whereas mass media provide definite forms of solidarity, however,
they do so with little or no interaction. Thompson describes broadcast
media as ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ because they are only semi-interactive.
In Thompson’s view, only direct interaction, be it face-to-face or electronic
(‘real-time’), can qualify as a form of reciprocity. Clearly, Thompson feels
obliged to include broadcast as a form of interaction, but does not specify
why this term needs to be retained when no reciprocity is alleged to be
occurring.
What becomes the distinguishing feature of quasi-interaction is not
its ‘interactivity’ in a conventional sense, but that it is able to act as a
mechanism of communicative solidarity for social actors. Identification
and recognition make up for the lack of reciprocity in such a situation. In
this, Thompson redresses the way second media age theorists dismiss or
overlook the fact that broadcast, even if it is unequal at the level of inter-
action, still facilitates a powerful form of social integration – one which
even colonizes electronic interactivity itself – in, for example, the way in
which Internet participants aspire to broadcasting their own personal
web-page. Thompson also overcomes the unnecessary historicization of
media ages that is widespread in contemporary literature.
In order to restore the social aspects of the different types of inter-
action specified, Thompson also proposes that mediated interaction and
quasi-interaction have their own systems of social organization. He con-
ceives of these systems as being built out of the basic building blocks of
‘local contexts’, which he calls ‘interactive frameworks of production’.
However, for mediated quasi-interaction, only the producers of symbolic
forms are immersed in a ‘local’ interactive framework of production,
whereas for the recipients, who are indeterminate, another framework is
added, ‘interactive frameworks of reception’.
In the social organization of face-to-face interaction, there is no sepa-
ration between the context of production and of reception.
In the social organization of mediated interaction, the context of
production and that of reception are separated, but the settings of the pro-
duction of messages are also available for face-to-face kinds of interaction.
We may be writing a letter or an email and be able to engage in embodied
conversation.
The social organization of mediated quasi-interaction is also a setting
for face-to-face and mediated interaction. Whilst watching television we
can be on the phone or engaged in conversation with others who are
also watching the television. This confluence of media events becomes a
form of ‘social organization’ when ‘[t]he conversational content of the
face-to-face interaction may be determined largely by the activity of recep-
tion, as when individuals are involved in commenting on the messages or