Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Thus, for Williams, agents have a moral obligation to give carriage to

what is commonly approved and controlled, and where the agent unre-

flexively assists in the process of transmission, without regard for the

standards of expression, he or she is acting in a way that is ‘inferior to the

poorest kind of source’ (293).

To follow Williams’ argument, agents are a necessary part of any kind

of mass communication, but they are also significant actors in the ‘medi-

ation’ of culture itself. They figure deeply in the way that reception and

response depend on factors other than the ‘techniques’ and means of

transmission. But they are so often overlooked as mediators of communi-

cation because of the fact that dominant and popular conceptions of the

communication process make too sharp a distinction between source and

technique, an author-message and conduit (cf. Meyrowitz), not leaving

much room in between for the idea of agent.

Abstraction and the Internet

A much more recent abstraction argument which provides an account of

the Internet from a social theory point of view is that of James Slevin, in

his useful volume The Internet and Society (2000). Slevin draws together

theoretical analyses from Anthony Giddens, John Thompson and a theorist

of postmodernity, Zygmunt Bauman.

Giddens prefigures the constitutive abstraction argument discussed

above, but in a less developed way. Nevertheless, Giddens’ more familiar

concept of ‘space-time distanciation’ is one suited to developing a contex-

tual analysis of the Internet.

Giddens argues that traditional forms of institutional socialization

have declined as our occupation of social space is today less tied to a sense

of physical place (see Giddens, 1990; this is also integral to Thompson,

1995). In Giddens’ account it is not merely new communication practices

which contribute to such de-physicalization, but also monetary exchange,

travel, chronological time-keeping and old communications technologies

such as print. The distanciation characteristic of these techno-social

arrangements produces a ‘“lifting out” of social relations from local con-

texts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-

space’ (Giddens, 1990: 21). The ‘disembedding’ of close-knit social relations

results in more abstract forms of social tie, in which time-space relations

are no longer experienced as restraints on actors (Giddens, 1987). The for-

mer characterize band societies and agricultural communalism, whereas

civilizational (pre-industrial) societies and industrialized societies are

characterized by successive forms of disembedding (cf. Giddens, 1987:

93–6). Giddens (1987) argues, ‘The level of time-space distanciation char-

acteristic of band societies is low. The mobile character of the society does

not involve a mediated transcendence of space: that is to say, it does not,

as in large societies, involve regularized transactions with others who are

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