Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Technological extension

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the

technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of

knowing will be collectively and corporeally extended to the whole of

human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our

ner ves by the various media. (McLuhan, 1964: 11)

Any form of interaction which exceeds embodied mutual presence

requires the extension of one or more communicative faculties. A number

of the thinkers examined in the previous chapter view media in terms of

an overdevelopment of one or more aspects of sensorial culture – print,

the image, oral culture – so much so that, in the case of McLuhan, it is

proposed that an entire epoch can be based on it.

However, the property of extension, which may enable the continua-

tion of face-to-face kinds of cognitive communication across time and

space, also introduces entirely new qualities which are not possible within

face-to-face communication. And it is thisproperty of extension that is

common to both broadcast and interactive technology.^5 Any medium

which enables such extension will necessarily transform the content, form

and possibility of what can be communicated. As Meyrowitz (1995) sug-

gests, analyses of mediums are significant because they suggest that

‘media are not simply channels for conveying information between two

or more environments, but rather shapers of new environments them-

selves’ (51). For this reason, writing and print can also be included as tech-

nologies of extension. Both are able to dispense with presence insofar as

they can reach across both space and time (see also Sharp, 1993: 232).

Technological extension, which can never reproduce the fact of

embodiment (despite the ideological project of virtual reality), nonetheless

facilitates a great number of possibilities which mutual presence cannot

fulfil. Two of its broadest features are that technological extension can

transform:

• the symmetry of a communication process (as with broadcast);


• the temporal mode of presence of a communication process (as with
  delayed interactivity versus real-time communication and storage
  retrieval – synchronous or asynchronous).

When it is technologically extended, broadcast, which is possible

within Internet sub-media like email and bulletin boards as well as tradi-

tionally regulated apparatuses, typically involves a temporal separation

between the point of production of communication and the point of con-

sumption. For example, television has been described as ‘a vast relay and

retrieval system for audiovisual material of uncertain origin and date which

can be served up instantaneously by satellite and cable as well as broad-

cast transmission and videocassette’ (Morse, 1998: 107). The production

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