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Introduction – A Second Media Age? 3
background even if they aren’t actually watching it, the near desperation
that many Internet users have in downloading their email, or individuals
who find security in having a mobile phone even if they use it only
seldom.
But of course, behind our surface contact with this system of objects
are definite social relationships, relationships which new communication
and information technologies enable to be extended in time and space
(see Sharp, 1993). At the same time, however, the particular way in which
they are extended can also be considered a relationship itself, which is
capable of acquiring an independence from the function of extending ‘pre-
technological’ or pre-virtual relationships, even if they somehow might
take different kinds of reference from these relationships.
What this book proposes is that these electronically extended rela-
tionships are constitutive of their own dynamics, dynamics which can be
studied beyond the bewildering array of object technologies which, in
their very visibility, render the social relation largely invisible.
In particular, the social dynamics that will be analysed on the basis
that they can be analysed as part of this technologically extended sphere
of social integration are broadcast integration and network integration. By
the end of this volume, I aim to show that these kinds of integration are
ontologically distinct – that is, distinct in external reality, not just theoreti-
cally distinct – whilst at the same time mutually constitutive.

Communication in cybercultures

The technologically constituted urban setting which Schwoch and White
describe is increasingly typical of contexts of everyday life which preside
in the processes of modern communication. Communication does not
happen in a vacuum, nor does it happen in homogeneous contexts or
simply by dint of the features of a natural language, but in architectural,
urban, technically and socially shaped ways.
This book explores the interrelation between these contexts and the
character of a range of communication events. It is about the contexts of
communication in so-called ‘information’ societies as well as the kinds of
connection that these contexts and the communications themselves make
possible. The urban and micro-urban realities that can be described in the
everyday experiences of James and Mimi are integral to the understanding
of contemporary communication processes. Is there a relationship between
the increase in the use of CITs and the increase in the number of people
living alone in America, Australia and Britain? Is there a logic which links
the privatization of public space like shopping malls and the dependence
on broadcast and network mediums?
In the last ten years, the convergence between technologies of urban
life and new communications technologies has been remarkable. It has