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188 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Brosnan (1998), in his positivist psychology of technophobia, suggests
that ‘until technology becomes invisible, it will be found to create feelings
of anxiety within certain individuals’ (2). In the interests of novelty,
Brosnan tries to suggest that young people may suffer from technophobia
on account of greater expectation over their proficiency. However, this
argument is not supported by the studies. What is important, though, is
that older people who live alone tend not to be so ‘technophobic’, possibly
because they may welcome object-centred relationships as substitutes for
human relationship partners who have been lost. Studies in Germany of
older age group television audiences display a similar trend (see Grajczyk
and Zollner, 1996).
Despite several 1980s studies that otherwise show a clear correlation
between technophobia and age, Brosnan is reluctant to link the two,
except to say what is clear is that the earlier individuals have their first
experience with computers, the less anxiety they will experience with
them. His account interchanges ‘technology’ with ‘computers’ at the peril
of much confusion. ‘As the diffusion of technology throughout many
aspects of life has exposed virtually everyone to computerization, the
relationship between anxiety, age and experience has become less clear’
(21). The problem with this statement is that Brosnan amalgamates all
technologies into one experiential maelstrom, for which he takes PCs to
be a metonym. As we saw with mobile phones and SMS, the basis for gen-
erational differentiation can have a very short history and be concentrated
in extremely narrow sub-media of New Media.

Network communities

The foregoing perspectives on types of bonding with both personal com-
munication technologies and media objects deals with the more visible
kinds of rituals that people have with media, via the embodied interface
that they have with actual physical media. In large measure the concrete
subject–object nature of this relationship provides ready evidence for
ritual cases to be put concerning media. However, it may do so whilst
hiding the less tangible relationship individuals may have to mediums.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, the problem with studying network
communities, or ‘virtual communities’, as they are often called, is that they
can easily be rendered as metaphysical and abstract as the ‘personalized’
relationships are concrete. Moreover, the various theories of virtual com-
munity, what Rheingold (1994) has called a ‘bloodless technological ritual’,
can attain truly theological meanings as various theorists revel in the
power, the totality and the unity of the universal condition which it is said
to promise.
I am not therefore arguing that communication studies should
not examine interaction with mediums, which is surely of paramount