‘plastic in its interactive possibilities: A typical personal computer might
have e-mail, Web chat, RealAudio, word-processing and a news ticker
functioning at the same time’ (57) where users may vary their attitude in
how they construct their own media environment.
There are two problems here. Firstly, the sense in which McLuhan
suggests that users become the content does not permit the agency of
manipulators or of agents who have an attitude to the medium in which
they are immersed. Secondly, as Turkle and others have well shown, iden-
tity in virtual space is infinitely substitutable, and can itself be manipulated.Reciprocity without interaction – broadcast
We have seen, with Thompson, the description of broadcast as a form of
mediated quasi-interaction. The concept of quasi-interaction Thompson
adapts from Horton and Wohl’s concept of ‘para-social interaction’ (Horton
and Wohl, 1956). In an article written in the mid-1950s, when the meta-
psychology of media consumption had barely been analysed, Horton and
Wohl explore the idea of intimacy at a distance, and the way in which
audiences identify with performers as face-to-face events. ‘The new mass
media are obviously distinguished by their ability to confront a member
of the audience with an apparently intimate, face-to-face association with
a performer’ (228). This intimacy, however, is not necessarily governed by
a ‘sense of obligation, effort, or responsibility on the part of the spectator,
and indeed lies in a lack of effective reciprocity.... The interaction, char-
acteristically, is one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and
not susceptible of mutual development’ (215). Similarly, in Thompson’s
typology, the mediated quasi-interaction of books, newspapers, radio and
television does not have ‘the degree of reciprocity’ or ‘personal specificity
of other forms of interaction’ (Thompson, 1995: 84). Nevertheless, it estab-
lishes a structured ‘social situation’ of symbolic exchange in which audi-
ences are able to ‘form bonds of friendship, affection or loyalty’. In other
words, because it is monological, it lacks mutual interaction but enables
strong forms of identification which carry a form of reciprocity.
This latter function of mass broadcast media has been emphasized by
the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann. In Luhmann, all forms of commu-
nication contribute to the construction of reality, but mass media are pecu-
liar in producing a continual ‘self-description of society and its cognitive
world horizons’ (Luhmann, 2000: 103).
As with Thompson, mass media are characterized by widespread
dissemination, and ‘anonymous and thus unpredictable uptake’ (Luhmann,
2000: 103). This leads to a paradox: ‘the reproduction of non-transparency
in transparency’. Mass media are self-referential; they may not actually
reflect a reality outside themselves. However, what is transparent is that144 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 144