become self-referential. These two aspects – the spectacle and simulacrum
properties of broadcast media – are active in constituting worlds of repre-
sentation which attain ritual status for media audiences, and indeed
become sources by which audiences acquire the symbolic and semiotic
materials with which to construct a meaningful identity and a world-
space of personal object meanings. As Silverstone (1999: 99) observes, the
role of ritual community is confined to broadcast.
In a capitalist society these ritual processes are largely of benefit to
the culture industry. But spectacle and simulacrum also generate appar-
ently resistant rituals, which, on the surface, seem to be a reaction to the
very structure of broadcast itself, but which the culture industry continu-
ously re-appropriates.
As we saw in Chapter 3, this system of cultural production where the
few produce culture for the many is widely condemned by the different
celebrants of the Internet. For them, the major feature of the Internet is
that it enables democratized participation in the public sphere, which in
the era of broadcast and ‘systematically distorted communication’ is other-
wise undermined. These debates about democracy, the public sphere and
techno-social conditions of communication are increasingly being sub-
sumed within a theory of community.
The levels argument explored in the previous chapter suggests that
abstract communities have just as much intensity as face-to-face-based
senses of community. Even the most abstract and disembodied levels have
rituals and ceremonies capable of integrating ‘strangers’ – indeed ordinar-
ily they transform strangers into natives. These rituals may be symbolic,
such as voting, watching sport, etc., but they can also be very practical, such
as annual tourism pilgrimages, downloading email or watching the same
programme, such as the evening news, every day of the year.
However, what distinguishes broadcast forms of ritual from media
ritual in general is publicity, an element of display and of spectatorship.
Publicity and public spectacle are, of course, an aspect of flâneriewhich
cannot be achieved on the Internet. Remember that flânerieinvolves a
dialectic of seeing and being seen. Display, rather than an exchange of
sign-values and texts, is at its core. Broadcast institutionalizes such prac-
tices of spectacle display and spectatorship, which may or may not be
technologically extended, by creating specular spaces of association.
This function of broadcast is posited by some sociologists as con-
tributing to the maintenance of social order itself, as Bob Mullan has
pointed out. Quoting from Shils and Young’s well-known discussion of
the coronation of Elizabeth II (1953), Mullan shows the continuity
between the embodied and extended rituals of coronation, both of which
sustain social order and power:For Shils and Young: ‘the central authority of an orderly society, whether it be
secular or ecclesiastical, is acknowledged to be the avenue of communication
with the realm of the sacred values. Within its society, popular constitutionalTelecommunity 207Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 207