Page 148 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 139
For the moment, I would like to stress how the crisis of the transmission paradigm was
2
not just an internal, academic affair, but ran parallel with developments in the ‘real’
world, where the spread of modern capitalism from core to periphery, which was very
much undergirded by the increasingly global deployment of ever more sophisticated
space-binding media, has been found to have led not to the creation of an ordered global
village, but to the multiplication of points of conflict, antagonism and contradiction.
Never has this been clearer than in today’s new world (dis)order, Wallerstein’s ‘true
realm of uncertainty’. In short, the crisis of the transmission paradigm takes the shape
here of a deep uncertainty about the effectiveness of the Sender’s power to control. For
Sender, read (the media of) modern capitalism. In this context, it shouldn’t surprise that
the transmission paradigm was particularly hegemonic in communication theory during
the high period of American hegemony as the superpower within the modern capitalist
world. Neither is it surprising that the crisis of the paradigm erupted when that hegemony
started to display cracks and fissures.
Within communication theory, this crisis has led to a proliferation of semiotic models
of communication, which foreground the ongoing construction of meaning as central to
communicative practices. What such models reject is the assumption of transparency of
meaning which underlies the idea of communication as transmission; instead,
communication is conceived as a social practice of meaning production, circulation and
exchange. James Carey’s rich and important work epitomizes this shift by adopting such
a semiotic model in his formulation of a ritual view of communication, which he defines
as ‘the production of a coherent world that is then presumed, for all practical purposes, to
exist’ (1989:85). From this perspective, communication should be examined as ‘a process
by which reality is constituted, maintained, and transformed’ (ibid.: 84), the site of
‘symbolic production of reality’ (ibid.: 23). In Carey’s view, this social reality is a ‘ritual
order’ made up by ‘the sharing of aesthetic experience, religious ideas, personal values
and sentiments, and intellectual notions’ through which a ‘common culture’ is shaped
(ibid.: 34–5).
The gist of Carey’s theoretical argument is that communication is culture. Without
communication, no culture, no meaningful social reality. However, there are problems
with Carey’s emphasis on ritual order and common culture, inasmuch as it evokes the
suggestion that such an order of common meanings and meaningfulness can and should
be securely created. Carey’s proposal to build ‘a model of and for communication of
some restorative value in reshaping our common culture’ (1989:35) stems from a genuine
critique of the instrumentalist values of capitalist modernity, but his longing for restoring
and reshaping cultural sharing suggests a nostalgia for a past sense of ‘community’, for a
local-bound, limited and harmonious Gemeinschaft. But it is difficult to see how such a
(global?) common culture can be created in the ever-expanding and extremely
differentiated social reality constructed by capitalist modernity. To put it differently,
Carey’s concern with the time-binding functions of communication—its role as social
cement through the construction of continuity and commonality of meanings—seems
ironically to perpetuate the concern with social integration which is implicit in the
transmission paradigm. Carey’s position implies that a global village which is integrated
in both spatial and social/cultural terms can and should be brought about not through the
dissemination of pregiven meanings from Sender to Receiver, but by enhancing rituals of
mutual conversation and dialogue. In this sense, he unwittingly reproduces the