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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 93

communications is implicated in a radical transformation of social
relations. The development of complex modern societies signals
the rise of social interconnections (both between individuals and
institutions and between citizens themselves) which are increasingly
underscored by absence rather than presence; where interaction
is mediated through monetary exchange, through bureaucratic
administration, and through communications technologies and
media forms. Lifeworlds are shot through with the consequences of
actions whose authors are physically (and often cognitively) absent.
A citizen’s economic life can be rendered sensible, that is, amenable
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to a degree of ‘cognitive mapping’, only in the context of a vast
network of distant forces which, together, constitute the economic
totality; consumption connects the individual to a plethora of distant
production contexts; and freedoms are bounded by coercive measures
legislated by distant social actors. Similarly, the citizen is confronted
with action choices (as consumer or worker, voter or activist, etc.) that
will be consequential for others with whom, once again, no direct
or dialogical interaction will ever ensue.
Communications technologies allow citizens some element of
connectivity with the physically absent actors and social processes
through which their experiences and action choices are structured. For
the pre-moderns, absent sources of power – such as the expansive rule
of monarchs and churches – were bound to remain largely invisible
as well as impermeable. With the dispersion of communications
technologies, the situation is radically different. These technologies
enhance the potential to ‘work through’ the linkages between a
locally situated lifeworld and the intrusion of a world ‘out there’,
whilst creating new distantiated relations through the dissemination
of symbols: ‘lived experience’ and ‘mediated experience’ are
progressively interwoven. 13
The Habermasian model of public space, however, woefully
underplays the role of ‘mediated quasi-interaction’. Possibilities for
democratic ‘connectivity’ are in large part shaped by mass media.
Where mediated interaction disembeds dialogue and, in doing so,
can help to counteract the consequences of physical distance (though I
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shall later argue that this is only a partial account), mediated quasi-
interaction rarely serves the function of simply negating absence
or abolishing distance. Media channels engage with the problem
of societal complexity, constituting new modes of interaction
based on visibility: media personnel occupy the specialist role of
selecting, processing and producing vast networks of symbols and

23/8/05 09:36:09
Goode 02 chap04 93
Goode 02 chap04 93 23/8/05 09:36:09