Page 19 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-01.qxd 2/15/2005 10:30 AM Page 2

2 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Schwoch and White describe these interactions as ‘an unremarkable
series of events’ about which ‘few stop to marvel at how quickly and
unthinkingly certain aspects of technology – telecommunications based on
the electromagnetic spectrum and various wire-based telecommunications
networks such as the telephone – become part of our everyday experiences’
(102). Their very prosaicness, they argue, is what makes them so important
and powerful, because it is in our interface with these technologies, the
human–technical interface, that an entire pedagogy of technical competence
is fostered, a pedagogy which becomes almost buried in the thousands of
discrete habits and routines that both help us, connect us and imprison us
in the information society. 1
People who live in information societies not only encounter and ‘use’
information and communication technologies; rather, increasingly, their
modes of action are enframed by these technologies. They are not so much
tools as environments. Since Schwoch and White published their essay,
over a silicon century (seven years) has passed, in which time a range of
interactive communication technologies have come become meaningful
in our daily life. We could add to their scenario the emergence of digital,
optic-fibre and packet-switching technologies which have made the
Internet possible, and the normalization of satellite-based communications
and information devices like satellite phones and global positioning
systems (see Dizzard, 2000). More often than not, we are not even aware
of the extent to which these technical systems precondition the simplest of
activities – an ignorance which was aptly epitomized by the trillion-dollar
anxiety over the millennium bug, the dreaded Y2K. 2
But this lack of awareness does not signal that we have become ‘over-
loaded’ with information, images or technology, as subscribers to the
3
‘saturation’ thesis suggest. Media saturation tends to encourage a view of
some order of unmediated experience, which is menaced by impersonal
scales of instrusive media. In this book, we will see that, in fact, attach-
ment to media can be very personal and as meaningful as embodied rela-
tionships, and that appreciating the strength of these attachments requires
a broadening of the concept of ‘cyberspace’.
The exponential explosion in webs of CITs (communication and infor-
mation technologies) has, at a phenomenological level, shifted the orienta-
tion many of us have to ‘objects’ to an extent that can change our sense of
4
otherness. As face-to-face relations are replaced by ‘interface’ with tech-
nological ‘terminals’ of communication, electronic devices acquire a life of
their own. Outside our own bodies the world fills with objects that are also
animated, an animation which might compete with the human – as sug-
gested by Sherry Turkle’s notion of the computer screen as a ‘second self’
(Turkle, 1984). Whilst the non-human might be competing with the human,
individuals themselves increasingly find that they are part of contexts in
5
which they are ‘objectualized’. Studies that have been conducted on these
phenomena show high degrees of attachment to media and communication
technologies, whether this be people’s need to have a television on in the