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52 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
primary forms of cultural mediation in information societies since the
Second World War. The important point here is that it is not possible, in this
view, to understand the second media age without understanding the first
media age. Traditional media are, as we shall see, central to the distinction
between the first and second media age. Writers such as George Gilder in
Life After Television (1994), Sherry Turkle in Life on the Screen (1995) or Mark
Poster in The Second Media Age (1995) understand the way in which the
second media age has arisen on the back of the conditions produced by the
first. These conditions – the production of an indeterminate mass by broad-
cast, the separation of individuals from the means of producing their own
contributions to public communication and the disintegration of traditional
community – are all hailed as being overcome by the Internet. But it is an
exaggeration to suppose this overcoming is a permanent condition or that
decentralized network communication simply annuls the power of central-
ized communication apparatuses. Rather, the power of the former is continu-
ously and relatively parasitic on the power of the latter.
According to the second media age perspective, the tyranny that is
attributed to broadcast lies in its hegemonic role in the determination of
culture (the culture industry) as well as individual consciousnesses
(the theory of hegemony) which derives from its predominantly vertical
structure. This structure is one in which the individual is forced to look to
the image and electronic means of communication to acquire a sense of
assembly and common culture. The second media age, on the other hand,
bypasses this ‘institutional’ kind of communication and facilitates – for
the romantic variety of cyber-utopians, it ‘restores’ – instantaneous, less-
mediated and two-way forms of communication.
At the level of interaction, the second media age utopians point to the
empirical increase in the take-up of the Internet and other network technolo-
gies, and to the fact that empirically it is true that the Internet is mainly
interaction and very little broadcast whilst television is mainly broadcast
with very little interaction, as evidence for the ‘ontological’ nature of the
second media age as a distinctive trend, movement and modality of social
integration. The importance of the fact that the many can interact with the
many in cyberspace is almost exclusively related to the way it is said
to break the ‘lock-out’ predicament which individuals face in broadcast
interaction. The contraining walls on mediated activities that are erected
by the power of broadcast rapidly disintegrate as a form of electronic
communication is made available which is adequate in speed, form and
complexity to encompass the abstractness of the social forms involved.
In Figure 3.1, the individual is subject to one-way communication from
the ‘elite’ producers of messages. The horizontal connection with other
consumers of the same messages is generally only possible via the fetish
of the image or the celebrity, in whom (as Durkheim once argued in rela-
10
tion to religion) concrete consciousnesses are concentrated. Conversely,
with the Internet, the message producers are bypassed, as the walls that
are erected at the horizontal level effectively disappear.