Page 135 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Global media/local meaning

Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village, of the whole world united through long-
distance communication technologies, has recently gained renewed popularity as a result
of a number of heavily televised historic events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Gulf War, the civil wars in Bosnia and Somalia. It is
largely through the representational practices of Ted Turner’s Cable News Network
(CNN) that the Gulf War could be dubbed the ‘Third World War’—a war in which the
whole world presumably participated through the electronic collapsing of time and space
induced by satellite television technology. Indeed, CNN’s unprecedented triumph in
catapulting the ‘War in the Gulf’ (as CNN’s caption went) as a ‘simultaneous happening’
into billions of dispersed living rooms worldwide seems to confirm Turner’s self-
proclaimed ambition, in the name of world peace and harmony, to turn the world
instantly into one big global audience. As Australian cultural critic McKenzie Wark has
observed:

The whole thing about the media vector is that its tendency is toward
implicating the entire globe. Its historic tendency is toward making any
and every point a possible connection—everyone and everything is a
potential object and/or subject of a mediated relation, realized instantly. In
the Gulf War, to see it [on CNN] was to be implicated in it. […] We are
all, always, already—there.
(Wark 1994:15)

However, this perception can be sustained only from a productivist view of the process of
mass communications, which needs to be complemented with the specific productivities
of the receiving end of the process. In other words, the idea of a unified and united global
village imagines the global audience as an anonymous ‘taxonomic collective’ (Ang 1991:
chapter 3), gathered together as one large diasporic community participating in ‘the live
broadcasting of history’ (Dayan and Katz 1992). Indeed, as Wark says, ‘we are all,
always, already—there’. But at the same time we are also not there. As audiences of the
Gulf War on CNN, we were present and absent at the same time. To put it differently, at
one level CNN is indeed a spectacular embodiment of the ‘annihilation of space by time’
brought about by what Harold Innis (1951) has called space-binding communication
media. The emphasis on speed of delivery and immediacy of transmission does indeed
produce a structure of temporal synchronicity which makes space irrelevant: a wide
variety of dispersed locales are, at this structural level, and assuming that they are so
‘fortunate’ to be able to receive CNN directly, symbolically bound together by the
simultaneous appearance of the same images on the TV screen. At another level,
however, the spatial dimension cannot be discounted when it comes to what happens to