Page 171 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 154

154 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
The particular social integration perspective which is to be introduced
here has a number of exponents, who, from varying and quite separate
moments in sociological theory, can all be written into the development of
a distinctive tradition. This framework can be vicariously observed in a
number of different intellectual movements: situational/interactionist
(Goffman; Thompson/Meyrowitz), phenomenological (C.H. Cooley/
G.H. Mead; Calhoun), and abstraction arguments (Durkheim/Sohn-Rethel;
Giddens/Sharp/Slevin).

Situational/interactionist perspectives

The work of Joshua Meyrowitz provides an invaluable resource for prob-
lematizing the significance of New Media. Meyrowitz’s writings are dis-
tinctive in the way they synthesize the media writings of McLuhan and
the sociological work of Erving Goffman. In his pre-Internet work No
Sense of Place, Meyrowitz (1985) was beginning to integrate communica-
tion theory and sociological accounts of everyday life in useful ways.
Meyrowitz’s use of Goffman is in taking up social role theory to
explain different levels of association. McLuhan’s notion of sense ratios is
abandoned in favour of ‘face-to-face’, ‘back region’ and ‘front region’. In this
view, there are many kinds of selves distributed across levels of public
and private ‘regions’.
In adopting this approach, Meyrowitz (1985) explores ‘a common
denominator that links the study of face-to-face interactions with the
study of media: the structure of “social situations”’ (4). The key premise
from which he conducts the analysis is that media have architectures
which shape social situations in profound ways. Media create environ-
ments and various forms of electronic assembly which can either cut
through spatial segregation or replace it with electronic versions.
Focusing mainly on the case of television broadcasting, Meyrowitz
primarily wants to show how electronic media can break down the
‘traditional association between physical setting and social situation’ and
teleport individuals into an electronic public sphere (7).

Imagine that many of the walls that separate rooms, offices, and houses in
our society were moved or removed and that many once distinct situations
were suddenly combined. Under such situations, the distinctions between
our private and public selves and between the different selves we project
in different situations might not entirely disappear, but they would certainly
change. We might still manage to act differently with different people, but
our ability to segregate encounters would be greatly diminished. We could
not play very different roles in different situations because the clear spatial
segregation of situations would no longer exist. (6)
All of the ‘backstage’ behaviours that are carried on in the cloistered
architecture of interaction would now be visible by larger audiences with