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Introduction – A Second Media Age? 15
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(as networks and electronic assemblies). The idea of a CIT of production
refers to the consideration of information mediums as environments
(see Meyrowitz, 1999; Poster, 1997) constitutive of altogether new kinds of
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behaviour and forms of identity. That is to say, they are not just repro-
ducing existing kinds of social relations, but bringing about new ones.

Interaction versus integration

Media of communication … are vast social metaphors that not only trans-
mit information but determine what is knowledge; that not only orient us
to the world but tell us what kind of world exists. (Carey, 1972: 285)

The distinction between activity and passivity as well as that between
mediated and unmediated communication falls well within the interac-
tive paradigm, based as it is on the face-to-face or ‘transmission’ analogue
for communication. This long-standing preference in communication
theory for the transmission model can largely be attributed to the preva-
lence of ‘interaction’ as its basic communicative building block, from
which are built the various accounts of communication.
The emerging alternative account is to distinguish between interaction
and integration. In this distinction, interaction is still important, but needs
also to be viewed in terms of the fact that all concrete interactions occur
in the context of dominant frames of communicative integration – which
is enacted through abstract ‘rituals’ of communication (see Chapter 5).
The integration thesis rejects the idea that the study of communication is
reducible to documenting empirically observable kinds of interaction, be
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these interpersonal or extended. In tribal society, for example, face-to-
face relations, and the significance of the body in communication rituals,
envelop the social whole. This is observable from the point of view of the
rituals and categories of seeing the world that are developed within such
forms of social tie (i.e. the anthropomorphizing of animals and objects in
the natural world). A person formed within this setting does not actually
have to engage in constant face-to-face interactions in order to be enveloped
by the set of relations that are bound up in its ontology. Even when such
interactions are not occurring, the ontology of the face-to-face as a centre of
cultural formation comes to frame all other forms of interaction. So, dis-
tant forms of communion are made over ‘in the image’ of face-to-face.
Similarly, if we take technologically extended forms of communication as
characterizing a social tie of a different order again, we might say that in
modern media-saturated societies, mediums like television or the Internet
frame our lives even when we are not viewing or using them. This does
not mean that we avoid face-to-face relations, or are ‘addicted’ to techno-
logically mediated interaction; rather it means that we conduct our face-
to-face relations ‘through’ the dominant mediums or social interchange.
Here are some examples: