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Interaction versus Integration 159
up the structure of what we still take to be the mainstream life of society. Of
course such members of the intellectually related groupings go to work, get
paid, have families and go to the supermarket and the pub; but none of
these settings accounts for or defines the specificity of the relations within
which they carry on their distinctive practice. The second point relates to the
social form of which this abstracted practice is constitutive. Basically it
would seem that for the intellectuals we can say that interchange is medi-
ated by print which serves as one abstracted way of symbolizing the linguis-
tic element of face-to-face interaction. This technological medium allows the
social tie to be extended in space and in time. It creates a setting whereby
the participant is ‘lifted out’ of the relationships of everyday life and where
at least subjectively persons experience themselves as the authors of their
own creations. In other words, they begin to experience themselves as post-
individual or, as the contemporary pop term would have it, as ‘autonomous
persons’ acting in a setting where the boundaries or constraints visible in
ordinary life might seem to have dropped away. (62–3)

However, the emergence of the autonomous individual who no longer
has the roles which once seemed to be easily ascribed is not merely a
matter of changes in interaction. For social relations generally to take on
the mode of interchange which has characterized intellectuals for many
centuries,

different modes of the extension of the social relations must emerge – in
transport, in communication generally. To illustrate this process for the polity,
the extended process of commodity exchange and the reconstruction of the
practices of ideological integration, it is scarcely necessary to look beyond
the role played by television as a form of extended social relationship. But
the ways in which the population at large is drawn within the field of extended
interaction all require separate treatments in their own right. (63)

It is these ‘separate treatments’ which are quite underdeveloped in the
Arena thesis. However, Paul James and Freya Carkeek (1997) have pro-
posed levels of integration in a way in which New Media can be more
readily contextualized. Drawing on the Arena framework, they explore
‘levels of social integration’, ‘understood as intersecting forms of struc-
tured practices of association between people’ (110). The levels do not
exist as pure forms but are analytically distinguishable. Nominally, they
distinguish three levels: face-to-face integration, agency-extended inte-
gration and disembodied integration.
Face-to-face integration is defined as the level where the modalities of being
in the ‘presence’ of others constitute the dominant ontological meaning of
interrelations, communications and exchanges, even when the self and the
other are not always engaged in immediate face-to-face interaction. Under
such forms of interrelation, the absence of a significant other, even through
death, does not annul his/her presence to us. Agency-extended integration
involves the extension of possibilities of interrelation through persons acting
in the capacity of representatives, intermediaries or agents of others. (111)