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164 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
application’ (74). Thirdly, to the degree that institutional arrangements
allow, availability in time-space is enhanced. ‘Organizations can now store
masses of information on their websites and achieve around-the-clock
availability’ (75); in comparison, news in mass media will only be broad-
cast if it is televisable, newsworthy, etc. Finally, traditional mass media are
compelled to circulate symbolic forms in ways which parallel Internet
communication. Slevin points to the digitalization of broadcast and the
proliferation of channels and their specialization in programming and
audiences (76).
In each of these cases, the Internet is seen to recast the distinct time-
space conditions of electronic media in general. Ultimately, Slevin does
not oppose the Internet to broadcast; rather, the two forms must be con-
sidered in relation to institutional forces, as comprising a complex level of
extended integration that is distinguishable from face-to-face and agency-
derived modes.

Conclusion

The different levels arguments that we have explored differ from interac-
tion perspectives in that they suggests that media of communication can
act as bases of association which reach well beyond the communication
events they make possible. Meyrowitz’s understanding of media ‘archi-
tectures’ provides one kind of model for thinking about the hierarchies
of structured communication. It is a decisive advance on Thompson’s
model, which rests on an empirical reduction of ‘interaction’ (rather than
integration) whose basic analogue is the face-to-face; as such, it treats all
other interactions as ‘mediated’. ‘Mediation’ theory is a variant of the
reproductive view of communication: that mediated or extended com-
munication is a continuation of dialogical interaction by other means. The
integration argument insists that these ontological levels are constitutive
of distinct orders of the distribution of recognition relations, rather than
the mediation of some kind of ‘building-block’ form of interaction: the
face-to-face. In contrast, approaches like Calhoun’s and the Arena thesis
are concerned to show that the division between face-to-face, extended
and technically constituted is an ontological one, and that social integra-
tion via specific levels is more than simply the aggregation of commu-
nicative events within each of these levels.
Unlike interaction theory, which is derived from ‘transmission’
accounts of communication, and the idea that development in the means
of communication is about moral improvement, the integration theorists
view human culture as being engaged across a range of levels of commu-
nication. The sociological basis of the integration perspective resists the
tendency of interaction approaches to view the telos of communication as
providing a transcendental unity, a virtual community or global village.