COM 510 Communications Media Technologies & Embodiment Notion Paper

Read the following texts as well as my notes for this week (also attached under the module) and provide your reaction to the subject matter:

Loon, J. V. (2008). Media Technology: Critical Perspectives. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education. (Chapter 5).

Nunes, M. (2013). Ecstatic upsated: Facebook, Identity and the Fractal Self, in (Eds.). Wise, J. M. New visualities, new technologies : The new ecstasy of communication. Burlington, VT: Taylor & Francis Group. (7-26).

George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and cultureDownload Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture
. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.Gershoni, M. . (May 18, 2020).

• Provide a critical reaction to the texts exploring the juncture at which communication media technologies and the notion of embodiment and (Dis)embodiment intersect. Each of the texts addresses the issue of embodiment in the age of digital mediation with a different perspective in mind and in relation to different venues. You may choose to focus your discussion on one of these venues as long as you provide direct references to all of the texts. You may also address the videos that were linked via this module. Your discussion should integrate the different arguments made in the essays into your own take on the subject. Make sure to provide your own perspective and to develop your own voice as a writer. There are no definitive answers to the questions raised by the authors. The critique that you offer should join the conversation.The first part of the paper should demonstrate your ability to analyze and correlate the arguments presented by the authors of the assigned reading for the week, as well as the videos/film (60 points for a minimum of 3 arguments).The second part of the paper should demonstrate your ability to apply these arguments toward the discussion of media technologies while stating your position (25 points).Papers will be evaluated according to the extent to which they reflect thorough research, clarity of thought, and adherence to the principles of effective writing. (10 points) Give your paper an original title that represents your position on the subject. Make sure to include a reference page listing all texts including the videos. (5 points)(600 word, 1 inch margin all around, Times New Roman, 12 point font, 1.5 line spacing. APA style of citation) (10 poinDiscussion Questions II: Communication and Media Technologies – Embodiment and (Dis)embodimenPrepare at least one discussion question relating to each of the assigned readings for the week. Questions should relate specifically to the assigned texts. The questions should introduce the issue to which they are referring and present a critical question in response to the issue at hand. The assignment is designed to assess your fluency and understanding of the material rather than your effort to understand the reading. Class discussion will be guided by the questions that students prepared.

19
From the Digitalization of Society to the Production of a
Biomedicalized Food Culture
This chapter presents some of the conceptual elements and ideas that inform my doctoral
research. From a perspective rooted in Cultural Studies, I observe the development of what I
theorize as “biomedicalized food culture”, made possible by, among other things, the
digitalization of society. This research is part of the critical literature emerging from the field
of critical studies on food (see, for example, Brady et al. 2012; Koç et al. 2012), which
focuses on theorizing unequal relationships, exclusionary regimes or the normativities and
stigmatizations that contribute to the production of contemporary knowledge on food as well
as the links between food and bodies.
First, I will present some of the theoretical foundations underlying my critical thinking,
largely inspired by the work of Clarke et al. (2010) on the biomedicalization of society. I will
then define what is meant by “biomedicalized food culture”, by referring to some examples
to illustrate how it is deployed and materialized in a whole set of knowledge, practices,
discourses, etc., by which “healthy” food and contemporary bodies are defined. In so doing, I
will present how digitalization contributes to the development of this particular food culture.
I will conclude by briefly presenting some of the issues related to how, through this
biomedicalized food culture, “healthy” food and the links between food and bodies are
redefined.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
19.1. The biomedicalization of society
The theorization of biomedicalized food culture is inspired by the writings of Clarke and his
colleagues (Clarke et al. 2000; Clarke et al. 2003; Clarke et al. 2010) for whom the
biomedicalization of the social field participates in extension of its medicalization1 and a
change in the distribution of biomedical knowledge, reconfiguring the ways in which it
deploys and informs its relationship with the living. For Clarke et al. (2003), the addition of
the prefix bio to the term medicalization refers to the new possibility of transforming living
organisms, both human and non-human, through technoscientific practices and technologies,
such as bio-technologies, molecular biology and genomics. These practices make it possible
to start from the living itself (e.g. an individual’s tissues) and then transform it or even
generate new forms of living (e.g. synthetic biology). For Clarke et al. (2010),
biomedicalization is characterized by different interrelated processes2 that contribute to
redefining the ways in which bodies, health and life itself are understood. While the
medicalization of society has fostered the emergence of knowledge and practices aimed at
controlling medical phenomena such as diseases or injuries, biomedicalization focuses on the
transformation of the body through technoscientific interventions from the very beginning.
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
Biomedicalization, thanks to the innovations proposed by the technosciences, opens the door
to a desire to improve life according to a preventive logic informed by the urgency of
anticipation.
This biomedicalization of society takes place in a biopolitical context which, for Rabinow
and Rose (2006), favors a mode of governance of life through life itself. The resulting
governance strategies are based on the “objectifying” characterization of living organisms,
i.e. the development of a whole set of techniques, strategies and systems for categorization
and classification based on the measurable and evaluable characteristics of living organisms.
It is also in this context that new forms of subjectivity are produced, where injunctions to
self-responsibility and health care intersect, with a view to prevention and risk management:
“In this context, individuals move from being passive ‘profane’ patients to being active
consumers responsible for their own biomedical future. Whether it is about reducing risks
through self-monitoring and lifestyle changes, or submitting to expert testing and control,
the onus is on the individual to take what is constructed as crucial biomedical decisions
that affect their health” (Clarke et al. 2000, p. 23).
Fostered by the increased presence of computer and information technologies that transform
the ways in which bodies are understood, mobilized and worked upon, biomedicalization
allows the diagnosis, treatment and transformation of the biological from its very materiality,
through the adoption of measures deemed appropriate:
“Health itself and the proper management of chronic illnesses are becoming individual
moral responsibilities to be fulfilled through improved access to knowledge, selfsurveillance, prevention, risk assessment, the treatment of risk, and the consumption of
appropriate self-help/biomedical goods and services” (Clarke et al. 2003, p. 162).
In doing so, individuals are encouraged to act and become active consumers, responsible for
their health.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
19.2. The emergence of a biomedicalized food culture
The notion of culture in the expression “biomedicalized food culture” is inspired by the work
of Stuart Hall (1980) and is therefore part of a Cultural Studies perspective. Here, culture
must be understood as being (re)produced through practices that incorporate and materialize
what structures or modulates it. “Culture” is therefore observed in the deployment of a set of
knowledge and practices, such as the establishment of policies, programs, phenomena related
to popular culture, media, and economic, medical and other practices. The methodological
and analytical view I take of the development of this biomedicalized food culture is inspired
by this definition, which means that I identify and observe a set of heterogeneous practices
and discourses that today help to define what and how contemporary “healthy eating” is
understood.
To name but a few examples, I observe the deployment of this biomedicalized food culture
across the field of popular culture while information about functional foods is numerous.
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
Functional foods are defined and characterized by association between certain health benefits
and the ingestion of specific molecular bioactive components that are presumed to have the
potential to reduce the risk of chronic disease (definition taken from the writings of Kim
2013 and Scrinis 2012; see, for example, “Les fruits de mer protégeraient les aînés du déclin
cognitif” (seafood will protect seniors from cognitive decline) (La Presse canadienne 2016)).
This biomedicalized food culture is also deployed in the field of biological, biochemical or
nutritional sciences, multiplying the production of knowledge while questioning the links
between food and bodies according to a logic and desire to act on biological materiality. This
is the case, for example, with the new field of nutrigenomics research, promoted by the
Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto, which explores the
relationship between genes and food intake. Nutrigenomics attempts to understand how an
individual’s genetic variations and particularities influence physiological responses related to
the ingestion of certain nutrients, with the potential aim of understanding (and potentially
preventing) the risks of chronic disease development3. The presentation of the research
conducted in this field promotes the advances that can be expected in weight loss and the
supposed prevention of diseases such as diabetes, obesity, certain types of cancer, etc.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Technological advancements are also actively contributing to the development of this
biomedicalized food culture, as increasingly precise and personalized monitoring tools have
been designed. This is the case, for example, of the “MyFitnessPal” calorie meter, which,
thanks to a food database that systematically calculates the calories ingested, offers to help its
users lose weight. The personalization and commercialization of technologies that are
designed to produce knowledge that unites the body and food operates in a different way with
uBiome Inc. The company offers tools and knowledge for analyzing microorganisms, such as
bacteria and viruses, that make up an individual’s biological materiality in order to diagnose
their state of health and propose a diet corresponding to their body composition (Johne
2017).
These examples are too few to demonstrate the multiplicity of recurrences involved in
producing this biomedicalized food culture and the biochemical and biospecific knowledge
that emerges. These elements may not seem to be linked at first glance since they seem to be
coming from a multitude of distinct domains and produced by heterogeneity of actors in
various places. Nevertheless, they highlight how the practices and discourses of “healthy
eating” seem to present points of convergence in terms of their ways of producing and
mobilizing food and bodies.
Through the production of knowledge that constitutes contemporary “healthy eating”,
knowledge about the body is also produced. For example, it is possible to observe the
emergence of “plastic” bodies, whose very materiality or trajectory would be considered as
possibly transformed or modulated through the ingestion of specific nutrients. The idea of a
“plastic” body is also closely linked to the idea of a machine-body, which must be “fed” in an
appropriate way in order to maximize its potential and performance, following the metaphor
of the machine that requires proper maintenance for maximizing its performance. The
literature emerging from critical studies on nutrition allows us to reflect on the issues that
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
arise when links that are too causal, reductive and “universalizing” are created between the
ingestion of specific foods and supposed transformations of body components or functions
(see, for example, Kim 2013; Scrinis 2013). Thus, through the establishment of a causal,
decontextualized and universalized relationship between the ingestion of specific foods and
bodies, new normativities by which bodies are understood are produced and the way bodies
respond to ingesting foods is understood to be the same (Kim 2013).
These concepts such as “plastic” or “machine” bodies are particularly important in the
context of the production and circulation of discourses that link aging bodies to food.
Through these discourses, a conception of bodies emerges by which the aging process could
be slowed down or even prevented, as if the act of “healthy” eating in itself could guarantee
“successful” aging (Durocher and Gauthier in press)4.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
These are just some of the bodies that are produced, framed and oriented at the heart of this
biomedicalized food culture. At this point, I want to start exploring its deployment modes
from the forces that inform development. Thus, I conceive the widespread digitalization of
society as one of the driving forces behind its biomedicalization. This echoes Clarke et al.’s
(2010) theorization of the biomedicalization of society, which is understood to be made
possible through the deployment and use of computer and information technologies, which
allow transformations in the distribution and accessibility of biomedical knowledge, as well
as in the means and tools developed to capture it5. This biomedicalized food culture therefore
contributes, on the one hand, to the multiplication of informative content aimed at informing
individuals about what constitutes contemporary “healthy eating”, understood according to
its biochemical components, and which are themselves linked to the components and body
processes designed to be influenced by the intake of these nutrients. On the other hand, it
participates in the development of control and intervention practices on living organisms
based on food. This is, for example, the case for the development of a whole set of
technologies that contribute to promoting personalized and real-time monitoring and control
of what is ingested or the biological materiality of an individual.
Thus, as part of my doctoral research, I observe the modes and places of deployment of this
biomedicalized food culture as well as the forms of knowledge it contributes to produce. In
doing so, it is necessary for me to question how it is made possible and how it can be
articulated in a society characterized by the omnipresence of the media, which inform the
production and circulation of knowledge as well as the creation of particular practices,
constitutive of contemporary “healthy eating”. Through the exploration of this biomedicalized food culture, I would like to ask how knowledge about bodies is produced that
help define the ways in which they are understood and worked on. In doing so, I aim to
identify the new norms that are then created, uniting the body and nutrition. I will conclude
here with some of the critical questions that drive the ongoing research. Since biomediation
marks a change in the “distribution of biomedical information and knowledge and [in] the
responsibilities of individuals to seize it” (Clarke et al. 2000, p. 29), how should we reflect
on contemporary bodies, the intersection of injunctions to self-responsibility and self-care
and the production of knowledge that contributes to “healthy eating”?
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
How should we think about bodies in their relationship to food, when they are subject to a set
of surveillance techniques (e.g. blood tests to assess blood sugar or cholesterol levels, mobile
applications to monitor the calories ingested or expended in real time, etc.) and categorization
to help produce them as “healthy” or not? In this context, how is “being healthy” (re)defined?
19.3. References
Bardini, T. (2016). Entre archéologie et écologie. Multitudes, (62), 159–168.
Brady, J., Gingras, J., and Power, E. (2012). Still hungry: A feminist perspective on food,
foodwork, the body, and food studies. In Critical Perspectives in Food Studies, Doc, M.,
Sumner, J., and Winson, A. (eds). Oxford University Press, Don Mills, 122–135.
Clarke, A.E., Fishman, J.R., Fosket, J.R., Mamo, L., and Shim, J.K. (2000). Technosciences
et nouvelle biomédicalisation : Racines occidentales, rhizomes mondiaux. Sciences sociales
et santé, 18(2), 11–42.
Clarke, A.E., Shim, J.K., Mamo, L., Fosket, J.R., and Fishman, J.R. (2003).
Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine.
American Sociological Review, 68(2), 161–194.
Clarke, A.E., Mamo, L., Fosket, J.R., Fishman, J.R., and Shim, J.K. (2010).
Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Duke University Press,
Durham.
Coveney, J. (2006). Food and Aging. In Foucault and Aging, Powell, J. and Wahidin, A.
(eds). Nova Science Publishers, New York, 61–73. Available at:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/61167795.html.
Durocher, M. and Gauthier, M. (2018). A food blog created by and for elders: A political
gesture informed by the normative injunctions to eat and age well. Interaction Design and
Architecture(s) Journal, 36, 75–92.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture & Society, 2(1), 57–72.
Hepp, A. and Tribe, K. (2013). Cultures of Mediatization. Polity, Cambridge.
Hepp, A., Hjarvard, S., and Lundby, K. (2015). Mediatization: Theorizing the interplay
between media, culture and society. Media, Culture & Society, 37(2), 314–324.
Johne, M. (2017). Go with the gut – at uBiome Inc., science meets business opportunity. The
Globe and Mail, 7 April. Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-onbusiness/go-with-the-gut-at-ubiome-inc-science-meets-businessopportunity/article32676714/.
Katz, S. (2013). Active and Successful Aging. Lifestyle as a Gerontological Idea. Recherches
sociologiques et anthropologiques, 44(1), 33–49.
Kim, H. (2013). Functional foods and the biomedicalisation of everyday life: A case of
germinated brown rice. Sociology of Health and Illness, 35(6), 842–857.
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
Koç, M., Winson, A., and Sumner, J.M. (2012). Critical Perspectives in Food Studies.
Oxford University Press, Don Mills.
Krotz, F. (2009). Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In
Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, Lundby, K. (ed.). Peter Lang Publishing,
New York, 21–40.
La Presse canadienne (2016). Les fruits de mer protégeraient les aînés du déclin cognitif. La
Presse canadienne, 11 May. Available at:
https://www.lapresse.ca/vivre/sante/nutrition/201605/11/01-4980484-les-fruits-de-merprotegeraient-les-aines-du-declin-cognitif.php.
Lundby, K. (2014). Mediatization of Communication. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin.
Rabinow, P. and Rose, N. (2006). Biopower Today. BioSocieties, 1, 195–217.
Scrinis, G. (2012). Nutritionism and functional foods. In The Philosophy of Food, Kaplan, D.
(ed.). University of California Press, Berkeley, 269–291.
Scrinis, G. (2013). Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice. Columbia
University Press, New York.
University of Toronto (n.d.). Should your DNA determine what’s for dinner? University of
Toronto. Available at: http://boundless.utoronto.ca/impact/should-your-dna-determine-whatsfor-dinner-nutrigenomics-el-sohemy/
Chapter written by Myriam DUROCHER.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
1 For Clarke et al. (2000), the medicalization of the social field refers to the expansion of the
jurisdiction of medical practice and its authority across society, generating a new form of
social control not only through the medical institution, but also through the development
of a medicalized relationship with the living body.
2 For Clarke et al. (2010), biomedicalization is achieved through a set of co-constitutive
processes: 1) the co-constitution of new knowledge, technologies, services and capital
through a new biopolitical economy of medicine, health and disease; 2) the intensification
of the importance given to health, particularly oriented towards ideals of improvement
through technosciences and the development of increasingly personalized surveillance
tools and practices; 3) the technoscientific transformations of biomedical practices where
interventions for treatment or improvement are increasingly supported by technosciences;
4) the transformation of the ways in which biomedical information is produced,
disseminated and used; and 5) the bodily transformations that occur from within rather
than through the addition of external elements.
3 University of Toronto website: http://boundless.utoronto.ca/impact/should-your-dnadetermine-whats-for-dinner-nutrigenomics-el-sohemy/. The University of Toronto has
distributed promotional signs in the downtown area with the following question: “Should
your DNA determine what’s for dinner?”
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
4 See the work of researchers in critical gerontology, such as Stephen Katz (2013) or, more
specifically in relation to nutrition, Coveney (2006), who criticized the injunctions and
normativities associated with so-called “successful” aging, which involves, among other
things, maintaining good physical health and failing to consider the broader systemic and
structural factors that can prevent an individual from aging “healthily” beyond their food
intake.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
5 It should be noted that I am exploring the development of this biomedicalized food culture
informed by media theories (Hepp et al. 2015; Hepp and Tribe 2013; Lundby 2014),
which focus on the co-constitution of changes that occur in both culture and the media.
These theories question this interrelationship as today’s society is permeated by the
omnipresence of the media, participating in the production of daily communicational
practices, knowledge, norms, values and emotions that constitute our reality (Krotz 2009).
The branch of media studies that analyzes mediatization processes from a socio-cultural
perspective (Durocher 2017; Hepp et al. 2015) conceives that the “tightening” power of
the media is exercised and (re)produced through interaction, through the communicative
practices that are at the basis of the constitution of culture. Media theories therefore aim to
challenge the way in which media are developed and deployed in interrelationship with
culture (Hepp et al. 2015). Media here should therefore not be understood as being limited
to digital technologies and the use of interactive algorithms, but includes, more broadly,
any technology that enables the establishment of communicative practices as well as the
production and sharing of information. It is therefore possible to include in this definition
both institutional media and self-tracking applications, blogs, etc. Thus, I will prioritize
the name media in italics, with reference to its Latin origin, in order to distinguish it from
the name that would refer to mass media (Bardini 2016). The theories of mediatization
seem promising to me to reflect on the co-development of a biomedicalized food culture
and the media that inform its deployment, in light of the contemporary biopolitical
context.
George, Ã. (Ed.). (2020). Digitalization of society and socio-political issues 1 : Digital, communication, and culture. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from lynnu on 2022-10-13 17:50:52.
Disembodied Users: The Body Cost of
Technological Progress
Photo by Max Cavallari.
When the first generation of the iPhone was released, there seemed to be a
familiar phrase reverberating in businesses, homes, schools, and all other
spaces suddenly enlightened by the possibilities of this new, shiny black
screen: “there’s an app for that!” This exclamation accurately represented
the optimism of the time, a period that epitomized the seemingly endless
possibilities of the Digital Age.
The smartphone and similar highly networked personal devices have
steadily developed in the name of efficiency and connection, promising to
progress society by making lives easier. But in the 11 years since the first
iPhone came out, this optimism has been more quietly tinged by those who
question exactly what this progress is moving towards, and for whom.
Even though this “progress” has been vaguely defined and interpreted, it
continues moving forward. We have allowed technological systems to
realign our lives around the values that perpetuate a narrow definition of
success within Western capitalist culture.
Progress is defined by what can be measured and by who benefits from
those measured outcomes. This causes value to be placed
disproportionately on what can be measured, the quantitative metrics of
technology, over the qualitative human experience. However, these vague
but widely-accepted definitions make it difficult to even articulate or move
toward any authentic social or personal values.
Progress is generally understood as an advancement of some sort, a positive
and linear development. However, as scholars like Jennifer Daryl Slack & J.
Macgregor Wise suggest in “Culture and Technology,” progress necessarily
represents movement toward something, even if it is not explicitly defined.
Whether it be progress toward democracy, education, or the right to
participate in the digital economy, progress must have some end goal, along
with a way to measure its advancement. Slack and Wise suggest that these
goals can be categorized as either material betterment, which is usually
associated with higher levels of comfort and convenience, as well as
“hav[ing] more things,” or moral betterment, which is interpretive but
usually has to do with creating personal, social, and spiritual meaning in life
(Slack, Wise, 29). Progress in the United States is essentially defined
synonymously with the growth of technology.
History is presented as a linear trajectory propelled by the technologies
which advanced society, from the printing press to the Internet. Western
tradition, particularly the United States, has co-opted this technology-asprogress story to support certain ideals and outcomes. Because technology
is associated with Enlightenment values of scientific innovation, objectivity,
and rationality, it has been solidified with a “religious-like reverence” into
the fabric of Western culture (Slack, Wise, 37). These values are deeply
rooted in capitalist ideals of the American frontier, which sees expansion
and progress as an inherent right for Westerners, a Manifest Destiny as
inevitable as the passage of time.
The Industrial Revolution further stamped the fate of the idea that
technology implies progress. Because the development of technology is
generally accepted as a scientifically pragmatic way to maximize profit
through increased efficiency, it came to be associated directly with progress
(Zinn, Slack, Wise).
Technology-as-progress has been so pervasive both because it aligned with
Western capitalist ideals and because it can be easily quantified and
reproduced. If technology equals progress, then the metric for progress is
simply the presence of more technology. If Internet traffic, the number of
gigabytes uploaded to Google Drive, or other computational variables have
increased over a given period of time, progress has supposedly occurred.
This metric of progress simply requires the ability to count.
Progress continues to be measured this way rather than by how valuable the
technology actually is to those who use it. This limited definition aligns with
goals for material rather than moral betterment, partially because it does
not include a qualitative analysis that is able to encompass the experiences
of the people who actually use the technology.
As Rosch and colleagues articulated in their exploration of cognition and the
human experience in “Embodied Mind,” there exists no empirical method to
understand and measure the human experience in the same way that
science is evaluated. This can partially be explained by a cultural mistrust of
human subjectivity in favor of a supposedly more accurate, removed
analysis of data and figures, perpetuated mostly in Western spaces.
Throughout history, progress has predominantly been defined by those in
power who benefitted from certain advancements. Much like tech giants
who praise growing Internet traffic as a sign of social progress, interstate
networking and high-speed transportation were touted as evidence of
progress by those who profited from the railroad boom of the midnineteenth century (Slack, Wise, 44).
As technology comes to dominate social and economic hierarchies in much
more intimate ways than, say, the railroad industry, the power dynamics of
capitalism may be intensified by what Luis Suarez-Villa terms
“technocapitalism.” He argues that even though creativity holds increased
value today, it is only because it presents a promise for profit. However,
Suarez-Villa recognizes that the commodification of creativity “often fails to
produce its intended results” because it represents a steadfast attempt to
exploit “this most elusive and intangible human quality” (Suarez-Villa, 54). In
an economic landscape where the presence of the quantifiable outcome of
profit defines progress, even something as qualitative and subjective as
creativity is extracted to accommodate what can be measured and sold.
Explorations of corporatism in technology have been imagined through
science fiction in the early days of technocapitalism’s reach, such as in
Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, where communities can only maintain their
autonomy by outsourcing a creative commodity to the corporate elite. Such
themes are becoming less and less hyperbolic, forcing societies to question
whether or not the values of corporations align with their own values. Even
as achievements of the mind are hailed above all else, they are still
measured against values that corporations and other entities of power
define, definitions which are based largely on efficiency and material results
and therefore may discard the essence of a value such as creativity.
In what Shoshana Zuboff terms “surveillance capitalism,” a system which,
much like Suarez-Villa’s notion of technocapitalism, exploits human behavior
as its primary commodity, humans are becoming disempowered. Zuboff
argues that “our dependency [on technology] is at the heart of the
commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie
against the inclination to resist its bold incursions” (Zuboff, 17).
As technology has come to be associated with convenience, it is often
confused with progress and, therefore a sense of empowerment. However,
as social entrepreneur Jesse Weaver suggests, humans’ seemingly unlimited
reliance on technology is, in fact, forcing us to give up control by yielding
less resiliency and a weaker capability to perform basic cognitive functions,
like spatial mapping, independent of technological machines. This reliance is
partially why we have conflated progress with the expansion of technology;
because technology is associated with favorable outcomes that can be
evaluated concretely, like profit and convenience, the possibility for
cognitive dissonance between the human value of control and our
dependence on technology is diminished.
While certainly easier to measure, quantitative analysis does not provide a
comprehensive evaluation of progress. The time users spend on technology
has overwhelmingly been used as a metric for technological success, and
therefore overall progress. In Tristan Harris’ article, “How Technology is
Hijacking Your Mind,” the former Google Design Ethicist describes the ways
in which personal, networked technologies subtly exploit human
psychological vulnerabilities to increase the number of time users spend
online.
Because the success of a given technology is based on quantitative analysis,
it makes sense that longer online user engagement represents progress.
However, as Harris elucidates from his years of experience behind the
elusive doors of the tech industry, the goals which ensure their profit, like
maximizing the time users spend online, usually only represent progress for
the company facilitating the online experience, not the user. While the
company is gaining more profit, the user is removed from their physical lived
experience and is therefore more likely to experience depression, anxiety,
and distracted thinking (Hoge, Bickham, Cantor).
In addition, Harris challenges the idea that an abundance of choices online,
whether it be social contacts or links to informational articles, translates to
greater user empowerment. While the user is flooded with options, which
may appear to be freedom of choice, they may be distracted from their
original need by the dizzying number of results. As Hubert Dreyfus asserts in
On the Internet, our present construction of values is not conducive to
“collecting what is significant but connecting to as wide a web of
information as possible…Quantity of connections is valued above the quality
of these connections” (Dreyfus, 12–13).
Although qualitative analyses of success are more elusive, they are
necessary to accurately evaluate current technological systems and
processes to define ideal models for the future.
The definition of progress matters because it determines how a society will
move forward and define its goals for the future. Because we understand
progress as the expansion of quantifiable values such as efficiency and
convenience, we are actively designing and transforming our society under
these values. What we label as progressive will continue to develop and will
be seen as positive. In the technology-as-progress economic perspective, the
human body has been understood as a hindrance to progress through its
inefficiency and lack of standardization.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that this
drives both technological development and everyday social and economic
practices toward dehumanization by measuring success and modeling our
experiences through the frameworks of machine learning. We strive to
make humans more machine-like in an attempt to make the human
experience more quantifiable and to minimize what is seen as unproductive
excess — deviation from the mean, heterogeneity, and other “anomalies”
(Slack, Wise, Zuboff). Thus, experiences that cannot be neatly categorized or
incorporated into the framework of machine learning — which, much like
capitalists of the Industrial Revolution, values standardization and mind over
body — are labeled as irrelevant to the definition of progress.
Measuring the human experience through frameworks of machine learning
contributes to a societal transformation towards dehumanization. If certain
corporeal processes seem to get in the way of the mind’s Manifest Destiny,
this thinking goes, they should be conquered and controlled. The
mechanization of the human experience has largely been grounded in the
attempt to streamline what is labeled “excess.” This usually means
increasing homogeneity and security and reducing friction. If we define
progress through stability and neatly-measured outcomes, “we will all be
safe as each organism hums in harmony with every other organism, less a
society than a population that ebbs and flows in perfect frictionless
confluence…” (Zuboff, 385) Like Taylorism and other corporate “scientific
management” techniques at the turn of the century, these tactics allow
companies to standardize their output and maximize efficiency (Zinn).
However, as Zuboff articulates, this system “renders all people, things, and
processes as computational objects in an endless queue of equivalence
without equality” by denying the very foundations of the human experience,
which is largely dependent on friction and diversity to ensure a healthy
society and body politic (Zuboff, 375).
The dehumanization process rests on the assumption of disembodiment.
Debates on the relationship between the human mind and body have
questioned the salience of the body, particularly as the mind gains more
power and relevance in technological spaces. Some posthumanist scholars
hold the potential for a mind-body split as a positive, citing its potential to
free humans from their previously binding physical cells and access the
limitless possibilities of the mind. The idea that humans are limited by their
bodies and should therefore seek disembodiment is also supported by the
previously discussed capitalist-centric mentality which seeks to maximize
profit through efficiency.
However, many scholars have acknowledged the value of the embodied
experience. Often, embodiment is necessary to perform more advanced
cognitive functions. Disembodiment could potentially cause humans to “lose
our sense of relevance, our ability to make maximally meaningful
commitments, and the embodied moods that give life serious meaning”
(Dreyfus, 7). Dreyfus asserts that machine learning in artificially intelligent
systems requires not just the acquisition of “explicit knowledge,” like the
facts and figures which can be found in an encyclopedia, but
“commonsense” and “background knowledge” which can oftentimes only
be understood by having a physical body (Dreyfus, 17).
It is these more advanced human functions, which require the spatial
presence of a physical body, which could lead to moral rather than solely
material betterment as a metric for progress. In the widely-regarded
cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson explores this mind-body
balance through the protagonist, who adventures through cyberspace to
assist an artificially intelligent entity gain autonomy over a global network.
He describes cyberspace as an experience of being “totally engaged but set
apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information
interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market” (Gibson, 10).
While situated in fiction, this description of disembodiment highlights how
one can be both “totally engaged” while “set apart from it all,” how the
dissociation of mind and body can indeed be counterproductive.
Thomas Foster’s response to the themes of embodiment in Neuromancer is
that the development of new technologies presents the possibility of
broaching previously rigid separations between humans and machines,
creating unimagined possibilities for a “third space.” However, by modeling
our current culture and economy on the principles of machine learning,
simultaneously attempting to reject the body, we are contributing to what
Thorstein Veblen observed as “the adaptation of the workman to his work,
rather than the adaptation of the work to the workman,” which exploits the
mind-body relationship rather than utilizing the possibilities of a “third
space” (Marx, 572). Rather than seeing the mind and body as mutually
exclusive entities that dominate over the other at any given moment, we
should recognize the value in their intersection.
As Elizabeth A. Grosz contends in Volatile Bodies, such binary thinking
between mind and body is often not even possible to exist in such highly
networked, complicated systems as the body. We currently understand the
body as an essentially predictable, mundane cell for the more sophisticated,
sentient mind, and as something that is isolated, whose processes more or
less exist in a vacuum.
Such a simplistic understanding assumes that the body can be easily
conquered, that it can be measured and discarded without complication.
However, through her exploration of sexuality, Grosz elucidates that bodies
represent their own form of subjectivity, and, like sexuality, are “incapable
of ready containment” and “can no longer readily succumb to the
neutralization and neutering of its specificity” (Grosz, VIII-IX). Any attempts
to compartmentalize the body in accordance with our supposedly optimized
means of organizing our culture and economy will thus not be possible, and
will instead contribute to the suppression of the natural processes which
define the embodied experience, continuing to disempower humans by
inaccurately representing our goals for progress.
By limiting our definition of progress to what can be measured
quantitatively and thereby aiming to separate ourselves from the
uncertainty and subjectivity of embodiment, we are making it much more
difficult to define what progress means both descriptively and normatively.
By overvaluing what can be measured quantitatively, we are effectively
rendering “the scientific study of ourselves without a subject matter”
(Rosch, Thompson, Varela, 13). What purpose, and for whom does progress
serve if there is no defined, autonomous entity to receive its benefits?
If progress is defined by a steady movement toward the fulfillment of
values, those who supposedly reap the benefits of progress must have the
ability to define these values. However, human reliance on technology and
movement toward the unquestioned mechanization of the human
experience, which does not tolerate difference or friction, facilitates
disembodiment and weakness to the point where it becomes almost
impossible to even articulate and implement genuine values.
By rejecting difference and dissent, we are preventing ourselves from even
conceiving the values in which to define progress, as “the means of
behavioral modification elude our awareness and thus can neither be
mourned nor resisted” (Zuboff, 385). If these systems are supposedly built
to progress the human experience, then humans must be fully present, fully
embodied to define the values in which to strive toward.
Presently, these values are recursively defined by those in power, largely
through a mere measurement of technology’s supposedly inevitable
acceleration. Rather than defining progress through what can be measured
quantitatively and subsequently structuring our societal values and
economic metrics around these so-called values retroactively, we must
recognize the inherent value in qualitative analysis. The value of
embodiment must be restored to realize human power in creating our own
future.
As Suarez-Villa expresses, “society will have to play a central role in [ethical
agendas for research] if life and dignity of all involved are to have meaning”
(Suarez-Villa, 167). The future of progress must be defined by a socially
engaged critical mass. A fictional character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s science
fiction novel Aurora articulates the issue of complacency as a barrier to
examining and redefining sociocultural landscapes:
“We like to blame life for the problems we make, we threaten to change,
but it’s always fake; we bitch and moan that everything’s wrong, then we
get right back to getting along.” (Robinson, 23)
At the spawn of the Industrial Age, humans strove to produce abundant
outcomes through efficient means. Society was thus structured around
these values as they were incorporated into every fabric of culture:
education, the family unit, business, academia, and all other conceivable
sectors of human existence (Zinn). However, today we conflate means with
end, defining the desired outcome, progress, by the means, technology.
We have come to structure ourselves around the material betterment of
society, all the while convincing ourselves through the way we frame
history, marketing and branding, and other forms of cultural construction,
that we are simultaneously participating in a collective moral betterment, in
a mind-driven, technological Manifest Destiny.
We aim to overcome the physical body, existing solely by means of
cognition, in an attempt to achieve “progress.” However, his framework of
thought could potentially limit progress to the bounds which organize and
articulate machine learning and other inanimate technological systems,
driving humans towards increasingly compartmentalized, outcome-focused
economic and cultural structures.
Rather than attempting to suppress, castrate, and manipulate the embodied
human experience, we must recognize their value and the value of
experiential and qualitative methods of evaluation. If we neglect these
considerations, we will have no hope of defining societal goals toward a
more holistic and representative framework of cultural “progress.”
References
Dreyfus, Hubert L. On the Internet. Routledge, 2017.
Gibson, William, Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction Books, 1984.
Print.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana
Univ. Press, 2011.
Harris, Tristan. “How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician
and Google
Design Ethicist.” Medium, Thrive Global, 18 May 2016, medium.com/thriveglobal/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-googles-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3.
Hoge, Elizabeth, et al. “Digital Media, Anxiety, and Depression in Children.”
Pediatrics, vol.
140, no. Supplement 2, 2017, doi:10.1542/peds.2016–1758g.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping” Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture.
University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. Random House, 2016.
Slack, Jennifer Daryl., and J. Macgregor Wise. Culture and Technology: a
Primer. Peter Lang, 2015.
Suarez-Villa, Luis. Technocapitalism: a Critical Perspective on Technological
Innovation and
Corporatism. Temple University Press, 2012.
Varela, Francisco J., et al. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience. The MIT Press, 2016.
Weaver, Jesse. “Artificial Intelligence and the Dawn of the Reliance
Economy.” Medium, RE:
Write, 11 Apr. 2019, medium.com/re-write/welcome-to-the-relianceeconomy-3daab396ce4c.
Weaver, Jesse. “It’s Time for Digital Products to Start Empowering Us.”
Medium,
Medium, 29 Mar. 2019, medium.com/s/user-friendly/the-future-of-digitalproduct-design-is-about-human-empowerment-6a025bc330a.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1942-Present. Harper
Perennial Modern
Classics, 2005.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human
Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
3
Joost van Loon
Media
Technology
Critical Perspectives
I S S U E S
IN CULTURAL AND MEDIA STUDIES
MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
Critical Perspectives
I
S
S
U
E
S
in CULTURAL and MEDIA STUDIES
Series editor: Stuart Allan
Published titles:
News Culture, 2nd edition
Stuart Allan
Modernity and Postmodern Culture,
2nd edition
Jim McGuigan
Television, Globalization and Cultural
Identities
Chris Barker
Ethnic Minorities and the Media
Edited by Simon Cottle
Cinema and Cultural Modernity
Gill Branston
Compassion, Morality and the Media
Keith Tester
Masculinities and Culture
John Beynon
Culture of Popular Music
Andy Bennett
Media, Risk and Science
Stuart Allan
Violence and the Media
Cynthia Carter and C. Kay Weaver
Moral Panics and the Media
Chas Critcher
Cities and Urban Cultures
Deborah Stevenson
Cultural Citizenship
Nick Stevenson
Culture on Display
Bella Dicks
Critical Readings: Media and Gender
Edited by Cynthia Carter and
Linda Steiner
Critical Readings: Media and Audiences
Edited by Virginia Nightingale and
Karen Ross
Media and Audiences
Karen Ross and Virginia Nightingale
Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and the
Media
Edited by David Rowe
Sport, Culture and the Media, 2nd edition
David Rowe
Rethinking Cultural Policy
Jim McGuigan
Media, Politics and the Network Society
Robert Hassan
Television and Sexuality
Jane Arthurs
Identity and Culture
Chris Weedon
Media Discourses
Donald Matheson
Citizens or Consumers
Justin Lewis
Science, Technology and Culture
David Bell
Museums, Media and Cultural Theory
Michelle Henning
Media Talk
Ian Hutchby
Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the
Media
Edited by Chas Critcher
Critical Redings: Violence and the Media
Edited by C. Kay Weaver and Cynthia
Carter
Mediatized Conflict
Simon Cottle
Games Cultures: Computer Games as New
Media
Jon Dovey and Helen Kennedy
Perspectives on Global Culture
Ramaswami Harindranath
Undertanding Popular Science
Peter Broks
Understanding Alternative Media
Olga Guedes Bailey, Bart Cammaerts and
Neco Carpentier
Media Technology
Joost Van Loon
MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
Critical Perspectives
J o o s t v a n L o o n
Open University Press
McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
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email: enquiries@openup.co.uk
world wide web: www.openup.co.uk
and
Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121–2289, USA
First published 2008
Copyright © Joost van Loon 2008
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the
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6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Printed in the UK by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow
CONTENTS
1
2
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
ix
xi
AN INTRODUCTION
1
Mediation as a black box
Media as phenomena
Mediation and politics
Mediation as social interaction
Mediation as cultural reproduction
Technology as ordering
Form
Historicity
Cultural embedding
Embodiment (and disembodiment)
Outline
Suggested further reading
3
4
5
6
7
7
9
11
13
14
16
19
A CRITICAL HISTORY OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
20
Technological and social change: bias in the work of Harold Innis
Wealth, power, knowledge
From political economy to biophilosophy
The Tetrad
Critical media analysis
Media as ‘Extensions of Man’ [sic]
An example: print in China and Europe
22
25
27
28
30
32
33
vi
3
4
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CONTENTS
Decentred subjects
Hybrid media
McLuhan as a cyborg theorist?
Media evolutions
An alternative critique
Conclusion
Suggested further reading
38
41
42
43
45
47
48
ALTERNATIVE TRAJECTORIES: TECHNOLOGY AS CULTURE
49
A German trajectory: the work of Benjamin
Benjamin’s historical materialism
‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
Cult value and exhibition value
A British trajectory: cultural studies
Raymond Williams’ cultural history of television
Against technological determinism
Need and technological innovation
Anglo-German synergies?
Aura and structure of feeling
A French trajectory: Barthes and Baudrillard
Barthes: text and image
Text
Image
Denotation and connotation
Baudrillard on electronic hyper-visualization
Branding
Popular valorization
Telematics and the post-modern
The simulacrum
Entropy and self-referential mediation (autopoiesis)
Conclusion
Suggested further reading
50
51
52
54
56
57
59
60
62
64
66
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
77
79
‘MEDIA AS EXTENSIONS OF WO/MAN’: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIATION AND
TECHNOLOGICAL EMBODIMENT
80
Technological fixation: engendering the gaze
The pornography issue
Pornography as a technology of mediation
Simulation revisited: manipulating needs
Feminist medium analysis
Domestication
The ascendance of ‘the Feminine’
81
82
84
87
90
90
92
CONTENTS
5
6
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Post-humanism and cyberfeminism
Embodiment and enframing
Conclusion
Suggested further reading
93
95
99
101
NEW MEDIA AND NETWORKED (DIS)EMBODIMENT
102
Electronic communication media
The mass rally
Telematics and disorientation
Cyberspace and the interface
Interfaciality and identification: the case of cyber rape
Virtual being
Touch
Media as actor networks
Analyzing mediation as action
Representation and Re-Presentation
Transduction
Mediation and trust
Runescapism
Conclusion
Suggested further reading
103
104
106
107
108
110
112
113
114
116
117
120
124
127
129
CONCLUSION: THEORIZING MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
130
Mediation and ‘thirdness’
Attunement as an historical process
Sensibility and cultural specificity
Technological being
Inspiration
Coevolution
Medium, space and time
130
133
134
136
139
141
144
GLOSSARY
147
REFERENCES
155
INDEX
166
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book could not have been written without the generous and selfless support of
many people. The ideas that are contained here are the result of countless interactions
and conversations with people I have met over the last 20 years, at various places, and
to whom I am greatly indebted (my sincere apologies to anyone omitted from this list
who should be on it): Barbara Adam, Lou Armour, Ulrich Beck, Marc Berg, David
Berry, Roger Bromley, Michel Callon, Claudia Castaneda, Simon Charlesworth, Matt
Connell, Nick Couldry, Kingsley Dennis, Marc Deveney, Bella Dicks, Greg Elmer,
Caroline Farey, Willem Fase, Sarah Franklin, Anne Galloway, Paul Gilfillan, Mels
Hoogenboom, Alan Hunt, Penelope Ironstone, Richard Johnson, Willem Koot, Scott
Lash, Bruno Latour, Celia Lury, Siobhan Lynch, Annemarie Mol, Ray Nzereogu,
Hannah Rockwell, Ian Roderick, Ida Sabelis, Michael Schillmeier, Rob Shields, John
Tomlinson, Neil Turnbull, Jeremy Valentine, Alex van Spijk, Emma van Spijk, James
Walker, Harry Wels, Ian Welsh, Petroc Willy, Carsten Winter, Andreas Wittel, Dave
Woods, Stephen Yates, Sierk Ybema, Tao Zhang, many students who I have worked
with over the years and the many anonymous players on RuneScape who were kind
enough to share their experiences.
However, I want to give special thanks to Stuart Allan, who has been extremely
patient and most helpful, as a series editor, and made numerous valuable comments
on the earlier version of the manuscript; Chris Cudmore from Open University Press,
for his patience and generosity; Neal Curtis, who has kindly read parts of the manuscript, and provided me with some very useful criticisms and comments; and Emma
Hemmingway, with whom I have done part of the research that informs this book, and
whose sense of humour and wit have allowed me to continue with a smile. I also want
to thank Nottingham Trent University for enabling me to write this book.
Finally, I wish to thank my wife and soulmate Esther Bolier, whose loving support
and patience exceeds everything a person could possibly ask for, and my children Amy,
x
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MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
Mark, Anna and Claire, for continuing to bring joy to our lives and making the long
evening hours spent writing and editing this work endurable.
Parts of Chapter 2 have been published as ‘McLuhan and his Influences’ in D. Berry
and J. Theobald (eds) (2006) Radical Mass Media Criticism. A Cultural Genealogy.
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 161–76.
Biography
Joost van Loon is professor of Media Analysis at the Institute for Cultural Analysis of
Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Risk and Technological Culture
(2002) and coedited The Risk Society and Beyond (2000). He has also written numerous articles on technology, risk, and social and cultural change and is editor-in-chief of
the journal Space and Culture.
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
‘So far, relatively few people have witnessed the modern television under domestic
conditions,’ observed G.V. Dowding, an Associate of the Institution of Electrical
Engineers, in 1935. ‘No doubt the generally accepted idea is that it is pretty crude and
is little more than a tiny, dim flickering picture which is tiring to the eyes and doesn’t
show much more than shimmering spots and splotches. Probably many will decide
to wait for “improvements,” believing that everything must at its very beginning be
only a ghostly precursor of better things to come.’ While this view proved to be the
case – television would not become a familiar feature in middle-class homes until the
1950s – there is little doubt that the extraordinary potential of this new technology was
readily apparent to engineers, such as Dowding, at the time. Television had effectively
arrived in Britain on 22 August 1932, the night the BBC launched its first experimental
television broadcast service (even though the transmission standards to be adopted
remained a matter of fierce contention between the rival technological systems of
the Baird, Cossor, Marconi-EMI and Scophony companies). ‘For ten years or so it
hovered on the doorstep leading from the laboratory to the public spaces of practical
politics and then, with a single leap, it was over,’ Dowding remarked. ‘The pessimistic
prophets were shown to be false prophets.’
Evident in this brief account are several issues worthy of exploration for any enquiry
into media technologies, ranging from public perceptions of technical quality and
entertainment value, the commercial imperatives guiding innovation and invention, the
connections between the ‘laboratory’ and the ‘public spaces of practical politics’ or
even the evolutionary ‘leap’ of progress anticipated (or not) by prophets. More difficult
to discern, however, is how the particular uses of a technology are mediated by the
prevailing economic, political and cultural forces, structures and institutions in the
wider society. Joost van Loon’s Media Technology: Critical Perspectives represents a
welcome effort to investigate an exciting array of pertinent issues in theoretical terms.
xii
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MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
The central question posed by this book is: how does this process of mediation shape
our lived experiences of technological change? In appraising a range of divergent
responses to this question, van Loon argues that two aims must be kept in mind: first,
the importance of analysing media technologies with a view to better understanding
the contingent factors influencing their emergence, development and application;
and, second, the need to show how media technologies play a crucial role in the
(re-)configuration of social and cultural practices and formations. Accordingly, it is his
contention that we must rethink familiar sorts of assumptions about media technologies, and in so doing alert ourselves to a range of different futures than those which
seem to be prefigured by theories relying upon a certain sense of inevitability in their
prognoses.
The Issues in Cultural and Media Studies series aims to facilitate a diverse range of
critical investigations into pressing questions considered to be central to current thinking and research. In light of the remarkable speed at which the conceptual agendas of
cultural and media studies are changing, the series is committed to contributing to
what is an ongoing process of re-evaluation and critique. Each of the books is intended
to provide a lively, innovative and comprehensive introduction to a specific topical issue
from a fresh perspective. The reader is offered a thorough grounding in the most salient
debates indicative of the book’s subject, as well as important insights into how new
modes of enquiry may be established for future explorations. Taken as a whole, then,
the series is designed to cover the core components of cultural and media studies
courses in an imaginatively distinctive and engaging manner.
Stuart Allan
1
AN INTRODUCTION
Then there is the methodological problem posed by the conundrum of whether
the now so self-evident term ‘communication’ can properly be used in connection
with times and locations which manifestly were characterised by other terminology (drawn from mythology or religion). At any rate its enthronement in
philosophy was based in John Locke’s ‘Essay on Human Understanding’ on
the scarcely generalisable assumption that communication means the rendering
into speech of perceived ideas and consequently the linking of isolated individuals through ‘bonds of language’. The only trouble is that philosophy omits to
enquire how, without language, people are supposed to have arrived at their ideas
and conceptions in the first place. Liberation from this unfathomable confusion
came only with a technical concept of information which, since Shannon’s ‘Mathematical Theory of Communication’, avoids any reference to ideas or meanings
and thus to people. (Kittler 1996: 1)
Media are ubiquitous. This is not only because of the sheer increase in volume and
diversity of equipment specifically designed to facilitate information and communication processes, but also because more and more objects are being turned into (communication and information) media. It is generally accepted that we ‘communicate’ not
simply ‘via’ mobile phones or email, but also by means of hairstyle, make-up, clothing,
wristbands, t-shirts, plastic carrier bags (i.e., displaying brands and logos, indicating
‘where we shop’ or ‘what we buy’), etc. Indeed, our world can be characterized by an
increase in mediatization.
With the advent of modern industrial societies in the nineteenth century, media have
really become an all pervasive social force. First, in the form of transport (in particular,
the steam engine) and soon followed by communication media, such as the telegraph
and telephone, the industrial society in Western Europe and North America took shape
2
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MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
as a world of high mobility of goods and (some) people, as well as increasingly wideranging and accelerating forms of communication (e.g., Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990).
With the advent of radio and television alongside newspapers, one could argue, mass
media emerged as a set of technologies capable not only of facilitating the communication between people across wider distances in shorter time, but also the broadcasting
of information from very few to very many people. In particular, since the Second
World War, modern societies across the globe have been caught up in this process of
mediatization (Thompson 1995).
Yet, despite the rather obvious fact that we are becoming more and more reliant on
an expanding range of communication media, it is perhaps remarkable that we do not
give more thought to this process beyond such superficial observations. Mediated
communication is something we do, rather than think about. This is not simply the
case in everyday life, but also in the academy. For years, universities have expanded
their research and teaching programmes in communication and media studies, and
they continue to be popular subjects among students. At the same time, there is
a relative lack of concern for media as media. Instead, we simply talk about ‘the’
media.
Rather than analysing media as phenomena, media and communication studies have
continued to borrow their main analytical frameworks from other disciplines and
theoretical cadres. This usually comes in the form of understanding media in service of
something else, e.g., power, capital accumulation, ideology, social interaction and
popular culture. Furthermore, this servicing has generally been approached as either
‘context’ or ‘consequence’, with mediation in-between as ‘process’. Media were too
often simply treated as the black box between corporations and consumers.
There are, of course, exceptions. These are studies of media processes that focused
on mediation in terms of:
• organizational practices (e.g., Hall et al. 1978; Tuchman 1978; Schlesinger 1987;
Cottle 1993; Harrison 2000);
• media products (primarily in the field of semiotics and screen theory and mainly
concerned with media content);
• some sustained interest media-technologies, mainly from scholars associated with
McLuhanism (although these rapidly faded away in the 1970s).
It was in the early 1990s, with the rise of ‘studies of media use’ (Silverstone and
Hirsch 1992), that technology made a somewhat ‘surprise’ return. When we refer to
media-use, we are actually looking at how people interconnect with technological
agents in structuring their everyday lives (Moores 2005). The concept of technological
agency will be further explored in Chapter 2. In essence, it refers to the idea that
technology contains a capacity ‘to act’ (Latour 1988a). The question whether technologies are exclusively ‘reactive’ is not relevant here; what matters is that in everyday
life, people interact with technologies as if they are capable of acting on their own
accord and, thus, have agency.
AN INTRODUC TION
|
It is here where media-technologies become realized in specific forms and no longer
operate as ‘pure potentiality’ (of possibilities of things that could be done with them).
It is the use that makes a hammer a tool for joinery or smithing, a means of destroying
toys or a weapon of mass destruction. Use does not foreclose potentiality (a hammer
could still be all of these things), but actualizes it, in temporary form, to become ‘one’
with the practice of handling it.
Indeed, the media-use paradigm has already given strong hints of how mediation is
always contextualized by the cultural repertoires by which new technologies are introduced in domestic settings and how their use stabilizes over time. We now need to argue
the same thing when linking content and technology as both aspects of the mediation
process. This contextualization relates to the political economy of media as it involves
questions of how mediation takes place as socially organized practices. The strength of
a phenomenological approach to media is that it problematizes exactly that which
most communication studies approaches take for granted: the medium. What this
book will try to show is that an adequate media analysis should start with its reversal,
expressed in McLuhan’s (1964) famous aphorism: ‘the medium is the message’.
Mediation as a black box
Most advocates of media studies would emphasize the need to bridge effect-, contentand context-orientated approaches; that is, they recognize that understanding media
involves mapping and tracing the connectedness of specific contexts (conditions), contents and effects. This book offers a distinctive conceptual framework with which
mediation processes can be theoretically, as well as empirically, explored and critically
analysed. In doing so, it is concerned with the ‘lynchpin’ between context, content and
effect: media. That is, what context-, content- and effect-orientated approaches have in
common is that they are assuming media themselves to be a ‘black box’; either as a
transmitter of messages or an engine of meaning-production (also see Fiske 1990 for a
similar critique).
The aim of a phenomenological approach to mediation should be to prise open
some of the secrecies of this ‘black box’ and demystify them, so to speak. It is because,
thus far, the three aforementioned domains of media studies have such vastly different
conceptualizations of media (as organizations, texts or transmitters) that media
studies have struggled to adequately conceptualize this lynchpin.
The context in which this will be done is predominantly, but not exclusively, modern
Western society and culture. More specifically, it focuses on the role of media-astechnology. This is not because we need to assume that media analysis can be exhausted
by a focus on technology, i.e., that there is nothing more to media than technology, but
instead that a consistent focus on media-as-technology (hereafter ‘media-technologies’)
can help us clarify the process of mediatization and contribute to an explanation of
why especially communication media have become ubiquitous in modern society.
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Media as phenomena
An underlying theme in this book is the desire to think more clearly and deeply about
media by resorting to a more philosophically grounded theoretical engagement with
media-technologies as phenomena. However, it should not be read as a radical departure from the existing domains of the growing field of media theory, but merely a
conceptual recalibration. Whereas it will undoubtedly be somewhat at odds with most
of the dominant strands in the wider domain of media studies, most notably the
Marxist and functionalist approaches [e.g., political economy (Murdock and Golding
1977), hegemony theory (Hall 1980), public sphere theory (Dahlgren 1995)], as well
as those inspired by liberal pluralism (uses and gratifications theory; Blumler and
Katz 1974), audience studies (Ang 1985; Moores 1993), cultivation theory (Gerbner
and Gross 1976), it is not necessarily incompatible with any of these. The aim is not to
falsify other approaches, but merely to refocus our theoretical orientation to that which
is at the heart of media studies, namely the process of mediation. It is hoped that a
result of this reorientation, some of the aforementioned theoretical approaches may
actually also attain greater clarity.
The approach of this book has a lot in common with what is growing into a distinctive field of its own, namely ‘new media theory’ (Elmer 2002; Gauntlett and Horsley
2004). New media theory includes both theoretical and empirically grounded analyses
of digital media, telecommunications and the Internet, and is, by and large, well
attuned to exploring media phenomena beyond issues of domination and resistance.
New media theory has emerged out of a range of disciplines, which have converged
around issues of technological innovation, and their social and cultural embedding or
‘domestication’ (Bakardjieva 2005; Berker et al. 2006). Although there are clearly close
links with media studies, new media theory has not been subject to the institutional
straightjacket, simply because it has not sought to obtain its own (inter-) disciplinary
status.
Thinking about media is something we cannot do often enough. This is first of all
because not only do we think ‘through’ media; media also structure our thinking
(Curtis 1977). How we think is so closely bound to the media through which this
thought is processed and by which this thought is generated, that we generally do not
perceive thought as itself mediated. Hence, we normally take media for granted. It is in
our very nature to take media for granted because as Marshall McLuhan (1964) provocatively said: media are ‘the extensions of man [sic]’. It is usually only when new
media are introduced that we are actively encouraged to dwell on their ontology as
media, but such dwellings are often lacking in critical appreciation, as exemplified by
the ubiquity of naïve knee-jerk reactions of celebratory optimism, as well as derogatory pessimism. When this happens, it seems as if all there is to media critique is mere
opinion.
An example of this is the way in which the arrival of the Internet, in the late 1980s,
sparked quite a few publications, which (unfortunately too often) were being reduced
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to the issue of whether the Internet is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing (Dovey 1996). The
‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of this ‘thing’ called the Internet, of course, strongly relies on
the moral, ethical or political principles that are implicitly or explicitly invoked by such
evaluative comments. Hence, whereas for socialists the issue of commodification
played a central role, for liberals it was the role of state intervention and, for conservatives, it was the extent to which the Internet would support or undermine the moral
fabric of our culture. In each of these cases, the Internet itself remains of minor
importance, it is simply reduced to being a vehicle of (undesirable) social and political
consequences.
Mediation and politics
The example shows that much ‘thought’ about media has been cluttered by a preoccupation with evaluative political critique taking the place of a more phenomenonorientated analysis. This is directly reflected in a key text book on media theory, which
although over 15-years-old, is still a highly adequate summary of where we are: ‘media
theory is a branch of political theory’ (Inglis 1990: 3). Media theory and media studies
have insufficiently scrutinized the ontological nature of their object of study. That is to
say, the analysis of media is, by and large, derived from an assumption that media are
merely empty vessels that deliver content.
This explains why most media analyses have focused on either the political economy
of media production, the semiosis of media texts or the sociopsychological effects of
media consumption. This triad is a mere adaptation of the systems model which is still
the predominant paradigm of communication studies (Fiske 1990). In all three, the
medium is largely irrelevant because it is a mere instrument of either the accumulation
of power and/or wealth, the organization and transmission of meaning, or the means
by which people can experience (electronically generated) stimuli that may or may
not be meaningful within their everyday life settings, and could have social and/or
psychological consequences.
The purpose of this book is to drag the medium back into the spotlight. That is to
say, it wants to offer another way of theorizing media that does not reduce the medium
to a mere instrument. It will do so by providing an introduction to theoretical writings
on media that either explicitly or implicitly enable us to question them. The work of
media theory does not have to be invented from scratch; as much of it has already been
done extensively. However, what has been lacking, thus far, is a sustained theoretical
integration of the different approaches that have sought to explore and interpret media
as phenomena in and of themselves.
As a result of an often overtly political agenda, students of media studies are presented with a view of media as merely a political instrument or site of struggle. In the
UK, this has been interpreted mainly in terms of issues over power and domination; in
the USA it is predominantly discussed in pluralistic frameworks related to issues of
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access, balance and fairness; in continental Europe (as well all as in some non-western
nations, such as China) the agenda has been more one of cultural regulation, in which
media are seen as an instrument and venue of cultural policy. The consequence of this
is that media studies presents itself to students as an appendix of political science, but
it also creates the impression that media are merely instruments of political power, and
sites of struggle and domination. This leaves the concept of media rather empty.
Mediation as social interaction
Other attempts to theorize the media have reduced mediation to forms of social interaction. For example, John B. Thompson (1995) developed an approach to theorizing
media based on social theory. The implicit assumption in this attempt is that media
technology is merely a means of extending processes of sociation or social interaction.
For example, Thompson’s concept of ‘mediated-quasi-interaction’ implies that the
‘quasi’ nature of interaction is the consequence of a technological intervention. In
breaking up the face-to-face dialogical nature of speech, mediation performs a reduction of social interaction to enable its instantaneous replication for broadcasting.
Mediation is thus valued purely for its social features.
It could be argued that, in his own way, the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann
(arguably the most influential communication theorist in continental Europe) also
attempted to develop an understanding of media as an extended form of sociation in
his system-orientated version of social theory. For Luhmann (1982, 1990), the focus was
on communication as a means by which systems operate and provide means to affect
each other. This becomes increasingly necessary in a society marked by increasingly
specialized institutions (media). Mediated communication becomes itself a specialized
function, that is separated from other institutions. As a result of these increasingly
specialized mediation processes, communication itself has become an object of concern, an object of study and a matter of regulation. However, what remains difficult
to understand is what ‘pure communication’ entails (that is, communication without
content).
Both Thompson and Luhmann reduce mediation to social functions. As a result,
their models do not inspire inquiries into that which enables mediation in the first
place, that is, technology. Mediation is technological exactly because (at the same time)
it both reveals and conceals the process by which social interactions are ‘enabled’. The
problem with the separation of ‘media’ as a specialized institution is that it suggests
that it is somehow removed from what social theory assumes to be ‘the social’ (Latour
2005). This, in turn, begs the question of what ‘unmediated’ social interaction might
be. Too often, this is assumed to be interaction outside the so-called mass media of
print, broadcasting and computing; i.e., the already separated and recognized media
institutions. This, as we shall see next, is erroneous.
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Mediation as cultural reproduction
Media can also be reduced to ‘cultural tools’. For example, the work of Stuart Hall
(1980) on encoding/decoding is a good example of how media are black boxes providing the ‘encoding’ of messages so that they can be transmitted. Decoding then becomes
the work of human beings. The consequence of this thinking is that culture remains the
work of humans only; and the role of media themselves remains relatively obscure;
they are merely facilitators of ‘text’. The fact that Hall’s own interest in encoding and
decoding was primarily geared towards understanding how dominant ideologies are
(re)produced, further testifies to the dominance of a particular (narrowly defined)
notion of ‘the political’ in the history of media analysis.
Finally, there are approaches to understanding media that primarily understand it as
a means of (mass) communication. John Fiske’s work (1994), which includes a welldeveloped technological analysis, is still primarily geared towards an instrumentalist
approach of media as a means of (once again) political communication within everyday
life settings of popular culture. For Fiske, the role of media technology is only interesting in so far as it further reinforces the skewed political consequences of the messages
thus constructed. While placing a lot of emphasis on non-dominant interpretations
(as forms of resistance), Fiske only partially engages in an analysis of how ‘effects’, such
as dominant or resistant interpretations, are themselves technologically facilitated. To a
large extent, his approach to critical media analysis remains a matter of positioning,
the origins of which lie outside the realm of mediation itself, but are the consequence
of a distinctive ‘will’ or ‘ideological disposition’.
Technology as ordering
What unites many approaches to understanding media is thus a strong reductionist
assumption that technology has to be understood as a facilitator, a device or tool, in
service of something else. This ‘something else’ is deemed more fundamental and, as a
result, the process of mediation is reduced to an epiphenomenon. Furthermore, it is
quite remarkable that even if this ‘something else’ takes the form of a social, cultural or
communicative process, ultimately it is always the political that surfaces as the supreme
‘force’ of motivation.
By focusing more closely on the specific features of technologies of mediation, however, media theory is able to reveal that the concept of the political is not exhausted by
a focus on the public sphere, and the way in which ‘the public’ are organized by the
state, as well as more civic deliberations (Dahlgren 1995). Instead the concept of ‘the
political’ should be stretched a bit more to include the most banal events of everyday
life, on the one hand, but also to the more psychological and existential attunements
between human beings and more abstract technical systems, on the other hand. That
is, a phenomenological approach to mediation enables us to question that which
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mainstream approaches to theorizing media have too often taken for granted, such as
perception, cognition, mood and attunement. This is a rather more radical understanding of ‘the political’, which goes well beyond ideologies, institutions and regulations.
While the political is by no means irrelevant, a case needs to be made for understanding media ‘as such’, that is to say, not as instruments or tools, but as ‘agents’
of political, social and cultural processes. This is why we need to start a refocusing of
media analysis with a phenomenology of mediation in terms of technology.
This is not to suggest that media are only technologies; indeed, media could be
equally seen as social systems, organizations, businesses, cultural phenomena and
political actors, to name but a few. However, whereas such approaches are abundant in
the literature, there is a comparative lack of integration of perspectives on media
technology into the field of media studies. Too often, media-technological analyses are
being dismissed as ‘technological determinism’ without due consideration of what
understanding media-as-technology might contribute on its own. What is particularly
missing are attempts to connect media-analyses with more generic philosophical
approaches to technology, although more recently, this is changing. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is the work of Friedrich Kittler (1997) which is now finding
resonance in exiting recent publications, such as Fuller (2005) and Mackenzie (2002).
We cannot ignore that media are contested sites, and can provide means and instruments for—as well as agency to—the development and organization of collective
action, tactical intervention and forms of ‘resistance’. However, these terms should be
reconsidered as part of the technological assemblage, rather than outside of it. This
means that forces, such as ‘stakes’, ‘interests’ and ‘motives’, should be understood as
part of what constitutes technologies.
Technologies ‘enframe’ the world; that is they order them in the double sense
of providing a structure and commanding specific actions (Heidegger 1977; Adams
1993; Fry 1993; Van Loon 2000). This ordering constitutes the essence of mediation.
This focus will also help us to reconsider the critique of ‘technological determinism’,
which nowadays is used too often rather carelessly, to dismiss any form of criticism
that seeks to attribute some active and creative power to the technological itself.
A good example of how media-as-technology enables us to understand the particular way in which the world we inhabit is being ordered is Walter Ong’s (1982) historicoanthropological discussion of orality and literacy. Strongly influenced by the work of
Marshall McLuhan, he argues that, in cultures where orality is the primary or only
communications medium, human perceptions are structured on the basis of aural
paradigms. In oral cultures, listening is the primary mode of perception and is materialized in an acoustic conception of spatiality. Acoustic space generates a specific
modality of ‘presencing’ that is dominated by a timeless, but ephemeral referentiality
that can only come into presence through repetition.
In contrast, literacy is both linear and geared towards the visual. Literary cultures
‘preserve’ referentiality in symbolic forms that can be passed on as objects and thus
separated from the enactment of representation. It entails a ‘splitting of the medium’
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into the enunciating actor (the author) and the enunciated act (the text). Whereas, in
oral cultures, the medium remains a unified actor/act and thus always requires the
presence of the enunciator, literary media enable the isolation of the enunciated act
from the actor. The act can then be passed on as a separate item as it becomes the main
performative part of the media product. Repetition is thus no longer the province of
enunciation, but becomes technological (e.g., copying or printing a text). It is for this
reason that Ong associates literary cultures with forms of alienation, which – at the
same time – were also essential components for the development of civilizations.
Ong uses the contrast between orality and literacy to show that our very human
being, that is what it means to be human, is intertwined with how we communicate,
think and perceive. Indeed, his work shows that we need to focus more closely on the
technological dimension of media and mediation as a way to sculpture an approach to
understanding media that does not embrace an empty instrumentalism [which takes
media as simply the means by which something ‘more fundamental’ is accomplished,
such as collective (inter)action, socialization, propaganda or mass communication].
Following on from Ong’s seminal intervention, it is possible to suggest that an adequate
analysis of media technology should involve four key aspects: form, historicity, cultural
embedding and embodiment.
Form
Ong’s contrasting of orality and literacy provide a necessary deepening of (for
example) McLuhan’s more aphoristic reading of media history (see Chapter 2). It
highlights, first of all, that the form of mediation has a significant bearing on the way
in which communication works. Given the ubiquity of media today, it is a focus on
technology-as-form that enables us to understand mediation as incorporating a vast
range of different practices. Attention to form enables one to remain critical of any
type of instrumentalism.
This first premise of this book is therefore that we have to analyse media in terms of
their different forms, because it is through these forms that we can see how they
facilitate the formation of particular logics in terms of modes of sensing, interpreting
and reasoning. Whereas media studies have tended to favour analyses of content, and
thereby primarily concerned themselves with questions of ‘ideology’ or ‘discourse’, an
adequate media analysis should also contain a sensitivity towards the phenomena of
media themselves and not just what they seem to ‘contain’.
Only an inclusion of media-form enables us to study media as such. That is to say,
a phenomenological approach to media begins with an appreciation of mediation
as form. In this book I will therefore largely follow the phenomenological line
that seeks to identify and explore the nature of media, that is, their ontology. In doing
so, questions of politics (media as political instruments or engines of manipulation)
and effects (media as transmitting stimuli or offering services) are secondary, and will
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only be invoked through a more primary ontological analysis of what mediation
entails.
However, form on its own can only inform a very basic phenomenology. Part of a
phenomenological approach is to focus on media as embedded in specific environments. Indeed, even if one takes a completely instrumental view of media (that is,
media as vehicles for politics, social interaction or cultural reproduction), their phenomenological nature has to be understood in relation to the functions they fulfil and
operations they entail as instruments. Indeed, as we have already stressed, when exploring the consequences of media-technological innovations, we always have to pay
particular attention to the entire social, economic, political and cultural formation
within which such media-technology systems operate.
Central to a phenomenology of media is therefore the way in which a focus on
mediation enables us to connect to distinct conceptual domains:
• communication, as the ‘(inter)action’ through which meaning comes into being
(which is often truncated into debates over ‘effects’);
• culture as the ‘context’ as well as ‘content’ of that action (which is often further
differentiated into issues of power, wealth and knowledge; e.g., Innis 1982).
James Carey (1992: 15) distinguishes between two different approaches to understanding the relationship between culture and communication as ‘a transmission view of
communication’ and ‘a ritual view of communication’. The transmission view focuses
on communication as a process of sending and receiving messages over distances. The
ritual view is much older and portrays communication as the key means of association
(very similar to interaction), which is expressed in the etymological links with communion, community and commonness (Carey 1992: 18). Carey asserts that both have
distinct religious origins. Transmission relates to preaching and evangelization; ritual
communication to practices of worship, prayer and liturgical and sacramental ministry
within congregations. It is perhaps because the culture of the United States has been
traditionally dominated by Protestantism (Parsons 1973) that the transmission model
has been far more dominant there than the ritual model, which has its roots in the
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions of the early Christian Churches and (premedieval) monasticism (Winter 1996).
As Communication Studies has been dominated by North American scholarship
from the outset, it is perhaps no surprise that it has been, by and large, framed by the
transmission model. Indeed, in North America the very infrastructure of telegraphy
developed alongside that of the East-West railway (Carey 1992). The link between
transportation and communication was a key component of the colonization of the
‘Wild West’ through settlements that displaced the more nomadic modes of inhabitation of native Americans. Its close relationship with transportation made it an almost
self-evident part of the experience of colonization and the ethos of pioneering. Its
primary orientation [Innis (1982) called it ‘bias’] is towards overcoming the obstacles
of space and geography. The idea of cultivating ‘nature’ that was conceptualized as
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barbaric and pagan, could indeed be seen as a redemptive act in itself. The role of
communication in the coming into being of the United States is, thus, more than
merely instrumental; its very substance of spreading ‘the Word’, indeed its civilizationlabour (a term coined by de Regt 1984) is of fundamental significance to understanding
how the dominant culture of North America was initially formed and still persists to
this very day (Carey 1992: 16). Indeed, from this point of view, communication is
inherently a ‘moral enterprise’.
By contrast, the ritual view of communication has much closer ties with traditional
scholarship, first in the realm of theology, but later spreading to philosophy and the
social sciences. Since the birth of the modern academy in the nineteenth century, its
links with the emergent social sciences (such as psychology and sociology) were so
close that it was generally not considered necessary to study communications as a
separate field, let alone discipline. For Carey, the lack of scholarship based on the ritual
model in the US, reflects the latter’s underlying ‘weak and evanescent concept of
culture in American social thought’ (Carey 1992: 19). Hence, it is with this in mind that
a phenomenological approach to mediation could also be invoked to sharpen a more
cultural analysis of communication processes.
Historicity
As we have seen, media-technologies have pervaded almost all activities of human
beings. This has two rather paradoxical manifestations in commonsensical perceptions
of the role of media-technologies in human history. On the one hand, there is a generic
and usually unquestioned acceptance of the assumption that media-technologies have
caused many social, cultural, political and economic changes. Current examples of this
can be found in aforementioned lamentations over the rise of the Internet and the death
of face-to-face communication as determinants of an increasingly individualistic and
blasé society. On the other hand, (media-) technologies are often ‘taken for granted’ to
the extent that we don’t even seem to notice their workings (that is, until they ‘break
down’). We do not think about our use of and dependency on media as having any
effect on ourselves because they are merely things we use.
However, the paradox of media as autonomous causes versus invisible instruments is
easily resolved if we take a more historical perspective. When we look at the history of
distinct media-technological innovations, we discover a distinct pattern. When a new
medium ‘arrives’, that is, when its ‘usage’ moves from experimentation in laboratories
to taking on functions (i.e., ‘settles’) in everyday life, we notice their ‘effects’. That is,
we notice the difference that these media-innovations make to how we function as
human beings. The more radical the innovation, the more its effect is noticed.
Hence, the arrival of the telegraph was a far more historically marked event than
the arrival of the fax machine or the VCR. The radical nature of the telegraph was
its ability to facilitate communications over great distances with the immediacy of
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face-to-face speech. It was the first electronic communication medium. The fax
machine, however, arrived a century after the telephone. Its usage was more closely
associated with moveable typesetting (print), which was – at least in terms of its
appropriation of the alphabet – over 500-years-old by the time it linked up with telephony. The social embedding of the fax was merely a speeding up of mail, not a new way
of getting in touch, for which the telephone was still far more appropriate and effective.
Hence, one cannot understand the nature of any medium without taking into
account the historical context in which it came into being. This is the second premise
that underscores this book. It is a fairly obvious point, but nonetheless needs to be
made if only as an antidote to modes of thinking that attempt to read the ‘essence’ of a
medium purely from its internal, technological properties. It is also an antidote
against both poles of the false paradox: media are neither singular causes of social
effects nor inconsequential instruments of social, political or economic action.
A return to Ong’s work makes it clear that even within the most elementary media that
we can already trace the complex, interconnected nature of mediation. Indeed, while
speech and non-verbal communication have by no means been diminished during the
course of human history, it is noticeable how many more media have been introduced
since the beginning of time (e.g., itself a mediated event, mythologized by ‘recorded
history’). The introduction of inscription and writing, for example, in ancient Egyptian
civilization, combined the use of language (a rule-bound, arbitrary system of symbols)
in speech with the visual means of representation of cave painting.
Hieroglyphs are an interesting form of writing because they are ‘little pictures’ of
‘things’ they represent; this also entails a reduction of often complex visual realities to
rather simplistic icons. This reduction, in turn, has to be compensated for by the
invocation of connotations, which themselves have to be socially acquired through
learning. That is to say, the first systems of writing also entailed a more formalized
pedagogy of reading. This meant that a separation was made between understanding
in terms of ‘thought’ as opposed to ‘experience’ and this, in turn, can be seen as the
inauguration of formal abstraction (Ong 1982).
The arrival of the alphabet entailed the completion of the total abstraction of
writing as a medium of representation. The simplicity of the alphabet, in which a
relatively short number of characters can be put together to produce an infinite amount
of ‘words’, became the major strategic advantage for the development of print in
Europe. This is not the case in, for example, China, where the sheer amount of
characters or ideograms inhibited the rapid spread of moveable typesetting and
facilitated (not caused!) the consolidation of centralized control (Innis 1982).
However, the first consequence of the use of alphabetical writing was a radical
extension of ‘abstraction’ in forms of communication and thus an increased emphasis
on the development of ‘reading’ as a learned practice. The acquisition of know-how to
use (read and write) the alphabet thus brought with it an incorporation of the logic of
this abstract system. This logic was linear (letters making words, words making sentences, etc.). Whereas the alphabet was a lot easier to learn than hieroglyphs, because
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one acquires it through the linear logic that underscores it, it required a more radical
transformation of perspective because of its shift of meaning from the primacy of
icons to the absolute supremacy of symbols. Following Innis, McLuhan (1964: 86)
argues that the shift to the phonetic alphabet led to a demystification of writing. This,
in turn, entailed a loss of monopolistic power of the priestly caste over the realm
of representation in favour of the military and political castes. As everybody could
now learn to read and write, and it was no longer a lifelong enterprise; the printed
word could be instrumentalized in the service of the pursuit of strategic power and the
accumulation of wealth (see Chapter 2).
Cultural embedding
The articulation of the form of the medium within a specific historical trajectory
opens up a whole new domain of analysis, namely how relationships between media
have affected communication processes, i.e., the possibilities for shared meaning. The
content of mediation is not independent from the form of mediation because, as
McLuhan (1964) stated, ‘the medium is the message’. Even if we accept that this may
be a bit hyperbolical, we can still appreciate the merits of emphasizing mediation in
terms of evolution as it enables a historical sensitivity towards the way in which sensemaking is organized. In simpler terms, the organization of sense-making is what we
normally call ‘culture’.
The third premise of this book is that media analysis requires a sensitivity towards
the cultural embedding of mediation. This also means that we are always geared
towards analysing inter-media relationships, because it is in the articulations between
media that specific forms of sense-making become embedded in social forms and are
able to ‘endure’ over time. Moreover, an awareness of cultural embedding enables us to
look for transformations in the way in which sense-making relates to the sensibilities,
experiences and anticipations of those involved in it (which can be human, as well as
non-human actors). Culture highlights that meaning and significance emerge from
practices and do not exist in themselves. In short, sense-making is an enactment, it is
performative. This enactment will be primarily understood as ‘technology-use’.
If we accept that the role of media- technology is ordering both in terms of structuring and commanding, how we perceive, think and communicate, it follows that there is
no meaning outside mediation. The way in which the world is revealed and enframed,
and thus becomes significant, following specific historical trajectories, which can also
be mapped as media evolutions (as long as we include human actors in there as well).
In Chapter 2, we will see that these evolutions are very specific mediated nestings and
sequences that can only be explained when taking into account their cultural embedding. That is, media evolutions are not haphazard or autonomous, but involve specific
selections. These selections emerge from specific forms of engagement with the
technology, i.e., their use. Technological use becomes binding over time as particular
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selections, in turn, affect how we perceive, think and communicate, that is, how we
make sense. The emphasis on the enactment of sense-making enables us to identify
specific modes of agency, subjectivity, intentionality, as well as necessity, determination
and impact; in short, enactment highlights the process of motivation. All forms of
mediation are motivated.
It is this understanding of mediation as…