Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

consequences. In practising places, it makes no difference whether they are

global or local senses of place, corporeal or electronic spaces. Indeed

‘cyberspace’ is a place that we can become just as attached to by way of our

routines of navigation as we can by the repetition of meeting people when

we go into the street.

As I have argued in Virtual Globalization(Holmes, 2001), de Certeau’s

formulation is a very useful one for thinking across physical and virtual

spaces. In The Practice of Everyday Life(1988), de Certeau explores how we

can relate to our physical environment by practising routines of traversal

in our daily existence and observation which can equally be applied to

how individuals navigate media spaces.^5 Any medium which can extend

experience necessarily brings together local and global kinds of settings,

to the extent that it is globally accessible or extant. Indeed, as local worlds

become subject to accelerating flows of messages, bodies, styles and

commodities which course through them, attachment to electronic global

spaces can become more attractive, to the extent that they offer a stable

uniformity that can no longer be found on a local basis.^6

Sociality with mediums/sociality with objects

The centrality of ‘communities of practice’ for understanding the inter-

relation between local and global community also requires a differentia-

tion between the corporeal and virtual means of engaging with such

spaces. When we turn to the question of media spaces, there are two

dimensions of interaction involved in all media: interaction with medi-

ums; and sociality with the media technologies which give us gateways to

such mediums.

As we saw in the previous chapter, interacting with mediums is

explored by ritual perspectives of communication, whereas intersubjec-

tive communication is explored by transmission accounts.

The argument that, in information societies, individuals increasingly

interact with a medium rather than with other interlocutors is one which

is well supported not only by ritual communication views but also by

neo-McLuhanist and abstraction views. Moreover, the fact of interacting

with mediums is apparent whether we are discussing broadcast or network

integration.

Whether we choose to single out television or the Internet, interact-

ing with mediums tends to have two consequences: ritual forms of attach-

ment to an electronic assembly are usually accompanied by a parallel

tendency to fetishize the personalization of media technologies. In the

case of mediums, it is not that they ‘mediate’ our relationship to others;

rather, it is the medium itself which is worshipped. In the case of the per-

sonal media technologies, the relationship to objects with which commu-

nication is enabled can become more intense than to other persons.

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