A ritual view of communication will focus on a different range of problems
in examining a newspaper less as sending or gaining information and more
as attending a mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in
which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed. (20)Under a ritual view, ‘news is not information but drama’ (see Carey,
1989: 21; Morse, 1998: 36–67). But this drama need not be simply about
communion but can be based on anxiety. News is a premier genre for
invoking such anxieties, and the addiction of audiences to tune in to a
daily update can be to ritually satisfy Dionysian needs (See Alexander,
1986)^8. However, from a transport point of view, individuals are viewed
as simply ‘using’ the media to overcome their anxieties, rather than
the media having produced the behaviour which is supposed to be
overcome.
The transmission model of communication, on the other hand, pro-
motes the illusion that messages comprise ‘information’ that is simply
learnedand that they externally influence otherwise unmediated behav-
iour. Such a view takes no account of our attraction to such media in
the first place, and the way in which a ‘media event’ can come to mean
as much, in terms of attachment, or more, to individuals as non-media
events.
Carey is also critical of prevailing views of the power of media: ‘We
are (mistakenly) coerced into thinking of communication only as a “net-
work of power” which needs to be “balanced” at the level of content in
order to legitimately represent the pluralist interests of liberal democratic
societies’ (34). Such power derives not from media influence over con-
sciousness as hegemonic networks, but from a form of remapping and
displacement of primary environments of recognition and identification.
Both the ritual and the power dimensions of media have been in
Carcy’s view obscured by ‘uses and gratifications analysis’ (32). The ‘uses’
model reaffirms the notion that media are an instrumental extension of
processes of moral development (18). From telegraph to computer, com-
munication is seen to be about moral improvement. This is usually
expressed as new technologies being used to carry older forms of social
relationships in a new, more ‘helpful’ medium. This latter view is one
which can be characterized as a purely informational view of communi-
cation, in which communication becomes either a means of control or a
means of expressing individuality.
Table 5.1 summarizes the major differences between transmission
and ritual approaches.
Now that we have examined the difference between transmission
and ritual accounts of communication, I want to investigate the difference
between interaction and integration in terms of various typologies which
have been put forward in communication theory. We shall begin with
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