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54 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
screens, developing face-to-screen relations rather than face-to-face
relations, but this opposition is no longer significant, argues Sherry
Turkle, when the larger cultural contexts of post-industrial societies are
eroding the boundaries between the real and the virtual. It is not possible
to think of the individual as alone with his or her computer, as Sherry
Turkle explored in her 1984 text The Second Self; rather, as she more
recently suggests: ‘This is no longer the case. A rapidly expanding system
of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people in
new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality,
the form of our communities, our very identities’ (Turkle, 1995: 9). What
Turkle describes as the ‘Age of the Internet’ is synonymous with the
opportunity to build virtual communities ‘in which we participate with
people from all over the world, people with whom we converse daily,
people with whom we may have fairly intimate relationships but whom
we may never physically meet’ (10).
The extent to which the Internet is hailed as an overcoming of frag-
mentation and individualism is quite remarkable in recent literature. In
some cases it is attributed with an integrative function which is able to
correct a tendency that is over two hundred years old.
As Dave Healy argues, ‘the networked citizen ... is never alone’. To
the degree that the Internet represents a ‘culture of coherence’, he argues,
it serves as ‘a corrective to the dangers of individualism’ which Alexis de
Tocqueville spoke of in his visit to America in the 1830s (Healy, 1997: 60).
The message of redemption which is promoted in the second media
age thesis, be this for public or private, is a resounding one, a message
whose dreams of unity have theological undertones, to which I shall
return in Chapter 6. But for the most part, the second media age thesis is
derivative of a neo-liberalist broader faith in the emancipatory potential
of new means of communication, regardless of the actual exchanges that
are encouraged by such means. As Armand Mattelart (2000) has sug-
gested, an ‘ideology of limitless communication – but without social
actors’ has taken over from an ‘ideology of limitless progress’ (120).

The computer-mediated communication (CMC) perspective

There is an alternative account of electronically extended interactivity that
significantly predates the second media age thesis, namely the computer-
mediated communication (CMC) perspective.
The CMC perspective overlaps with the second media age perspec-
tive but is distinctively concerned with the way in which computer com-
munication extends and mediates face-to-face models of communication.
In this perspective the computer is as much a tool as a window onto
cyberspace. What it is that gets mediated in this perspective is face-to-face
interaction, whether this be between two people or many as in a chat