Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

• They have a Geistwhich can be likened to the expansion of freedom.


• They have their own logic that informs the judgements people make
  about the utility or value of the technologies in their environment.


• They inform the predictions that scientists and technology producers
  might make about personal technologies.


• They also have a socio-logic that results from ‘communities of people
  “thinking and acting together over time”’ (307).


• In making possible Apparatgeist PCTs, ‘the compelling image of perpetual
  contact is the image of pure communication... which is an idealization
  of communication committed to the prospect of sharing one’s mind
  with another, like the talk of angels that occurs without the contraints
  of the body’ (307).

Moreover, perpetual contact has a univeral historical status, parallel

with the ‘the image of perpetual motion that has driven the machinery of

the past two millennia’ (307). ‘Whereas the idea of perpetual motion con-

cerns the means of production, perpetual contact concerns the means to

communicate and interact socially, which is fundamental to humans’ (308).

Whilst Katz and Aakhus want to stress that their term does not

require technological determinism, because it is about constraint of possi-

bilities (307), their account is technological determinism at its worst,

as well as tautological. The essay is subtitled ‘A Theory of Apparatgeist’, a

theory of something that is predicated on their own theory. Their inabil-

ity to even imagine that any of the phenomena in the list above, even the

more credible amongst them, are attributable to any agents other than

PCTs and their Geistis worrying, but unfortunately typical of a growing

methodological essentialism around New Media impacts.

Post-social society and the generational divide

Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric

drama. It lives it mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great

alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are

inter faces within the new environments created by electric informational

media. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 9–10)

A key consequence of the transition to an information or knowledge soci-

ety that has received a lot of attention is the widening of the differences

between generations accompanied by a contraction of the time in which

this gap appears. Moreover, New Media environments such as ‘cyber-

space’ are said to have their own ‘time-worlds’ which operate at far greater

cycles than other forms of time.^8 In shorter and shorter cycles, the way

in which persons are formed by media is quickly outdated. Computer

companies employ adolescent ‘geniuses’ who seemingly have a natural

186 COMMUNICATION THEORY

Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 186