Page 146 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 137
theorization of capitalist postmodernity as a chaotic system, where uncertainty is a built-
in feature.

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE AND THE FALLACY OF
COMMUNICATION

Communication theory has traditionally used metaphors of transport and flow to define
its object. In the resulting transmission models of communication, as James Carey has
remarked, ‘communication is [seen as] a process whereby messages are transmitted and
distributed in space for the control of distance and people’ (1989:15). In putting it this
way, Carey foregrounds the deeply political nature of epistemological choices. In Carey’s
words, ‘[m]odels of communication are […] not merely representations of
communication but representations for communication: templates that guide, unavailing
or not, concrete human interaction’ (ibid.: 32). In historical and economic terms, the
instances of human interaction Carey refers to pertain primarily to the geographical
expansion of modern capitalism, with its voracious need to conquer ever more extensive
and ever more distant markets. Such was the context for the creation and spread of a
spatially biased system of communication, epitomized by the parallel growth of the
railroad and the telegraph in the nineteenth century, which privileges speed and
efficiency in the traversing of space. Spatial integration was the result of the deployment
of these space-binding communication technologies, first at the level of the nation, then
extending over increasingly large parts of the globe. Following Canadian theorist Harold
Innis, Carey describes modern capitalist culture as a ‘space-binding culture’: ‘a culture
whose predominant interest was in space—land as real estate, voyage, discovery,
movement, expansion, empire, control’ (ibid.: 160). In this respect, McLuhan’s ‘global
village’, a world turned into a single community through the annihilation of space in
time, represents nothing other than (the fantasy of) the universal culmination of capitalist
modernity. In short, what I want to establish here is the intimate interconnection between
the trans-mission paradigm of communication, the installation of high communication
systems and the logic of capitalist expansion.
But the control effected by communication-as-transmission does not only pertain to
the conquest of markets for the benefit of economic gain; it is also a control over people.
In social terms, then, communication-as-transmission has generally implied a concern
with social order and social management; hence, for example, the longstanding interest in
communication research, particularly in the United States, in the ‘effects’ of messages:
persuasion, attitude change, behavioural modification. What is implicit in this social
psychological bias in communication research is an (unstated) desire for a compliant
population, and therefore a belief in the possibility of an ordered and stable ‘society’. In
this sense, communication research has evolved as a branch of functionalist sociology,
for which the question of social integration (e.g. through the dissemination of a ‘central
value system’ throughout the entire social fabric) is the main concern. The effects
tradition was a specification of this concern in relation to the media: are the media
(dys)functional for social integration? This concern did not remain restricted to the
population within a society; it has also been envisaged beyond the societies that make up
the core of modern capitalism, as in the information diffusion theories of Third World