Sociality with media
As identified in the previous chapter, medium theory has a habit of
differentiating social forms according to regimes of communication.
Further, it tends to inflate the technical importance of mediums to the point
where a given era is defined by the technology itself. In this it does not
consider the question of social dependence on mediums, and the question
of social determination, which structures the way in which some medi-
ums become dominant over others. Moreover, medium theory tends to
argue that one rather than another medium is dominant because more
people are physically interacting with it. Integration theory, on the other
hand, argues that in any given communicative situation there is always a
co-presence of levels of mediatized integration involved – face-to-face,
agency-extended, etc. – but that one of these levels can come to recast how
all other levels are experienced. Thus, for example, in modern society it is
possible for those immersed in technologically extended communication
cultures to engage in face-to-face relationships in a disembodied register.
This is not to point to the fact that the modern ‘computer nerd’ engages
little in the way of eye contact. It is rather that such subjects necessarily
adopt CMC as a frame of reference, even when they are not engaged in
such communication. Conversely, persons formed in cultural settings
where the face-to-face relationship is dominant will tend to attribute
everything with a face-to-face character, even when they are not actually
engaged in mutual presence.
The integration approach to media is distinguishable from interac-
tion approaches which confine themselves to intersubjectivity. As we saw
in the previous chapter, integration occurs not by interacting with others,
but by interacting at the level of an indirect social relationship (Calhoun,
1992), one that is extended by another agent, be it another person or a
communication technology.
Moreover, following Meyrowitz, communication mediums possess the
quality that they can extend experience in ways that exceed the kinds of
behaviour found in local environments: media are not merely ‘channels for
conveying information between two or more environments, but rather
shapers of new environments themselves’ (Meyrowitz, 1994: 51). In a more
recent account, ‘The Shifting Worlds of Strangers’, Meyrowitz (1997) argues
that such re-territorialization changes the relationship between ‘them’ and
‘us’. The balance between oral, print and electronic environments pro-
foundly changes the relationship between strangers and ‘familiars’.
In regarding media as environments of sociability, traditional charges
of ‘technological determinism’ are no longer pertinent in the way they
were in the earlier years of media studies. One of the most cogent and per-
sistent accounts of technological determinism is that of Raymond
Williams in his Towards 2000(1983) and Television: Technology and Cultural
Form(1974). In these texts Williams is very critical of the way in which one178 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 178