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Theories of Cybersociety 53
Media producers

Media consumers as indeterminate undifferentiated ‘mass’
Figure 3.1 Transmission model: high integration/low reciprocity

These ‘media’ walls are the result of the architecture of broadcast
itself. As we saw with Debord in the previous chapter, the more the indi-
vidual looks to the media so as to acquire a cultural identity, the less he
or she looks ‘sideways’ for interaction. Conversely, the less the individual
looks sideways for social solidarity and reciprocity, the more this mode of
association becomes weak and de-normalized, and so the alternative
dependence on a centralized apparatus of cultural production becomes
imperative.
In the second media age, however, the walls separating individuals
at a horizontal level are overcome, as the individual looks directly to others
for a sense of milieu and association. As Poster (1995) explains:

Subject constitution in the second media age occurs through the mecha-
nism of interactivity. … interactivity has become, by dint of the advertising
campaigns of telecommunication corporations, desirable as an end in itself,
so that its usage can float and be applied in countless contexts having
little to do with telecommunications. Yet the phenomena of communicating
at a distance through one’s computer, of sending and receiving digitally
encoded messages, of being ‘interactive’, has been the most popular appli-
cation of the Internet. Far more than making purchases or obtaining infor-
mation electronically, communicating by computer claims the intense interest
of countless thousands. (33)

The Internet lifts individuals out of the isolation created by media
walls – particularly as these walls are reinforced in urban contexts. In
information societies, individuals increasingly interact with computer