222 COMMUNICATION THEORYtime, people who are shy or invalid can pursue community on the basis of
interests – again a prophecy of how the Internet is actually used.
Of course, Toffler, like the second media age theorists of more than a
decade later, saw the limitations of television in its lack of interactivity.^36
In line with the second media age thesis, he held great optimism for the
ability of extended interaction to help create community, but was opposed
to the idea of the ‘electronic cottage’ simply replacing other levels of com-
munity such as the face-to-face.
Toffler’s enthusiasm for community being made across a range of
intersecting levels can be better appreciated if we incorporate the insights
of the ritual views of communication. To do so is to immediately recog-
nize the value of both broadcast and Internet community as levels of com-
munity which can be negotiated with face-to-face levels of integration.
As we have seen in this chapter, virtual or telemediated community is
possible within both broadcast and network architectures of communica-
tion. The rituals involved in each kind of community differ, as do the fields
of identification that they produce. What they have in common, however,
is the character of enabling participation at a distance, in a movement of
expansion and contraction. Increasingly, the basis of consuming media
retreats to private media spaces, and from this privacy, individuals are able
to reach out to more global forms of connection, where those older inter-
mediate forms of community have all but disappeared.
This double movement of media ritual, the expansion of public forms
of display and visibility, but only from the interface of privately controlled
spaces, marks a general change in the nature of ‘interaction’. Between
these forces, to interact with others is to interact with media. Such media
receive their power from the fact they have a constancy that endures
beyond any particular individual communication event. This is expressed
in everything from the techno-spiritualism which worships divine com-
munion in cyberspace, to the everyday micro-rituals of media consump-
tion explored in this book.
Whether electronic mediated communication extends or substitutes
for intermediate forms of community, this book has also argued that it can
strongly be identified as a driver of urban and global culture which, whilst
uneven in the way it is connected to the transmission of local cultures, nev-
ertheless establishes quite distinct forms of culture itself, which have their
own rituals. Studying these rituals in the coming decades and how they
are related to social integration will be a task central to the social sciences.Notes
Parts of this chapter are derived from reviews and conference presentations or proceedings
which I have presented or published. These are: a review of Barney, Darin,Prometheus
Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology, The Australian Journal of
Political Science, 2001, 36 (3): 618–619, and Holmes, D. (1998) ‘Sociology without theHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 222