Page 172 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 155

Interaction versus Integration 155
better visibility. ‘Media, like walls and windows, can hide and they can
reveal. Media can create a sense of sharing and belonging or a feeling of
exclusion and isolation. Media can reinforce a “them versus us” feeling or
they can undermine it’ (7).
Importantly, however, Meyrowitz resists the temptation, common-
place in much Internet literature, to see New Media as having abolished
face-to-face interaction. Rather, for him, New Media expand the range of
possibilities of how individuals might interact, which can sometimes
present conflicting senses of the normative context in which actors are able
to take on roles. This may include confusion about which medium to under-
take interaction in, and the nature of expectations individuals feel about
having to speak, to reply or to listen. Thus the title of Meyrowitz’s book
No Sense of Place alludes not to the disappearance of a sense of place, but
to the saturation of the self by a clash of ontological ‘levels’ of association.
In a communicative culture dominated by television, individuals are
typically able to hide behind the medium of broadcast when they are
actually interacting with a television itself. Without the comfort of the
television on, even in the background, a kind of role-vacuum is created, in
which responsibility shifts to the individual to be self-active.
Meyrowitz’s analysis is well complemented in Thompson, but with
many of the conceptual shortcomings we identified above. Nevertheless,
Thompson also makes a thoroughgoing case for a ‘levels’ argument, even
though it does not carry a sense of integration. He claims that entire sys-
tems of social organization are based on these levels, but it is as though
such organization is functional to dynamics of techno-social systems rather
than fulfilling different kinds of needs that emerge out of changes in the
infrastructures of communication.

Calhoun’s phenomenological levels of socialization

Working from what can broadly be described as a phenomenological
approach, the American public sphere theorist Craig Calhoun has made
some progress with developing a levels approach which is an advance on
those of Meyrowitz and Thompson. In three important articles on computer-
mediated social relations, Calhoun (1986, 1992, 1998) innovatively devel-
ops the idea of indirect social relationships. Following C.H. Cooley’s
work in Social Organization (1909), Calhoun works up a typology-driven
model of communicative levels of social integration. Where Calhoun differs
from Thompson and Meyrowitz is in placing social integration rather
than interaction as the traversing agency across these levels. To explain
this we need to revisit Cooley for a moment. In Social Organization,
Cooley proposes the need to distinguish between primary and secondary
social relationships. ‘A primary relationship must be both directly inter-
personal and involve the whole person.’ A secondary relationship, by
contrast, ‘need meet only the criteria of directness’, but not in a way