Page 53 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-02.qxd 2/15/2005 2:04 PM Page 36

36 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
‘who’ ‘everyone’ is, nor would we want to. But when considered in relation
to the structure of broadcast media, it is clear that, for example, celebrities
are not they; their own identity is well defined, so much so that the media
produce genres of programming and magazines which are exclusively
about celebrities. Obversely, they aren’t written about and yet seem to be
everywhere. ‘They’ substitutes for the modern loss of specificity. We are not
quite sure how it works, we are not invited to participate, but they know.
‘They’, in this reading, is the emblem of individual disconnection and
disembodiment – of the fact of the loss of various practical knowledges
which are based in cultures of mutual presence and oral culture.
With all of these discourses, the question arises as to whether ‘they’
are peculiar to broadcast integration or to technologically extended
culture in general – of which the Internet is a part. This will be reassessed
in Chapter 4.

Mass media as the dominant form of access to social reality – Baudrillard

In the last section we saw how, whilst spectacle has become a highly
visible social reality, its influence over social behaviour is not so visible.
This influence is nevertheless manifest in specific discourses, which pro-
vide rare cases in which the field of recognition created by the broadcast
medium condenses into the content of that medium.
The way in which the attention of the audiences is concentrated
though spectacle is not unlike a contemporary form of ‘reification’ of
social relationships where the fetish of representations overtakes the con-
ditions of that representation. The spectrality of the image, and the
successive forms by which it becomes detached from social relations in
general, is also a central concern of media sociologist Jean Baudrillard.
But unlike the spectacle thinkers, Baudrillard argues that the ascent of a
culture of images produces a crisis in representation itself. In media soci-
eties, processes of signification are no longer underwritten by a meta-
physics of presence or the promise of recovering some kind of original,
authentic or privileged meaning.
The eclipse of ontology by the image rests with what Baudrillard sees
as the power of ‘simulacra’. This term refers to the way in which what we
consume from media becomes more real than what it supposedly refers
to. In elaborating the evolution of simulacra in his essay ‘The Precession
of Simulacra’ in Simulations (1982), Baudrillard takes us through four
phases of the representation the image. The image in its different guises:

• is the reflection of a basic reality;
• masks and perverts a basic reality;
• masks the absence of a basic reality;
• bears no relation to reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.