Medium theory insists on the need to look first at the architecture of
each medium, to assess the ‘subject position’ of actors within that medium.
For example, within broadcast, the viewer, listener or reader is constituted
in a ‘passive’ role as message creator, but a very active one in terms of the
need to interpret messages. In horizontal ‘network’ forms of communica-
tion, the avatar is constituted as a much more active kind of subject posi-
tion with respect to the medium. However, where it seems that individuals
have an active role in regard to a medium, the dependence and attachment
they have to that medium are often disguised. This attachment can some-
times be revealed when flows of communication are interrupted. When a
connection is broken, the resulting anxiety can be a measure of the attach-
ment, but also the way in which individuals relate to CITs which allow for
multiple connection, such as call-waiting on the telephone, multiple appli-
cations running at once on a computer, and channel-hopping on the TV,
can be a measure of the power of medium. The greater the urge to check
an incoming call or email, to roam channels, websites and stations, and the
more fragmented are the communication events, the more the individual
becomes a subject enveloped by the medium. When the linearity of
communication events is removed, the medium becomes more visible.
Over the past thirty years, the fact that mediums are about practice
and form, rather than content, has been the subject of numerous attempted
theorizations. These include glance theory (see Ellis, 1982), liveness theory,
audience theory and medium theory itself. However, when it comes to
understanding an individual’s relation to a medium, individual identity
often becomes obscured or one-dimensional – an effect of the medium
rather than an agent of it. The individual is no longer seen as an autonomous
monad with an experience of the real, but as nomadic, fleeting and con-
tingent. However, whilst the individual is no longer positivized, there is a
tendency for the impact of mediums to be exaggerated, which is a charge
often levelled at McLuhan, Baudrillard and the Krokers.
Christopher Horrocks (2001) claims that one of the shifts in
McLuhan’s thought is, in the early years, seeing media participants as
communicating through mediums, and, in the later writings, seeing them
as beingthe subject ofthe medium (57). By the time McLuhan first begins
to discuss the computer, he abandons the early discourse of viewers,
listeners and audiences in which ‘the medium is the message’ to a later
discourse about media users: ‘in all media the user is the content’ (58).
However, this quote from McLuhan (in McLuhan and Zingrone, 1997:
280–1) is closer to Baudrillard’s understanding of the mass as the conduit
of media than it is to user perspectives. But Horrocks interprets
McLuhan’s shift as accommodating a user perspective suited to wide-
band Internet: ‘With Virtuality, in its widest sense, the use of e-mail,
e-conferencing and other tools demonstrates the shift from McLuhan’s
definition of the user as participant througha medium to manipulator
of that medium’ (57). Horrocks argues that the telephone could not
be manipulated as a medium, however the personal computer is moreInteraction versus Integration 143Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 143