Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

The combination of utopianism and anxiety which is expressed there

seemed futuristic in the 1940s and indeed is in many ways typical of cyber-

space literature today. For example, the current fascination with chaos and

complexity theory is anticipated in Wiener’s discussion of entropy as the

tendency for system-based organization to deteriorate without constant

management by ever greater quantities of information.

For the latter condition to prevail, a state of perfect knowledge and

perfect exchange should exist in communication infrastructures. Wiener

would probably be very satisfied with the open and unconstrained char-

acter of computer-mediated communication on the Internet and Usenets.

Together with the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, he promoted the

circular realization of information flows containing feedback mechanisms,

which for them was a necessary condition for communicative solidarity.

Their critique of the mathematical theory was not a rejection of its posi-

tivism as much as the fact that, as a model designed by and for commu-

nications engineers, its unilinearity was unable to accommodate the social

characteristics of communication processes.

Implicitly, of course, the schools influenced by cybernetics were at the

same time critical of broadcast as an antisocial communication apparatus,

consisting of unequal relations between senders and receivers, and a dis-

tortion of information that resulted directly from broadcast’s technical

sub-structure rather than from class or ideological biases.

However, whilst the cybernetic schools may have rejected unidirec-

tional modelling, the idea of feedback does not necessarily make the

unilinear model of communication redundant, as John Fiske (1982) has

pointed out:

Feedback ... has one main function. It helps the communicator adjust his

message to the needs and responses of the receiver. ... Though feedback

inserts a return loop from destination to source, it does not destroy the

linearity of the model. It is there to make the process of transmitting

messages more efficient. (23)

So, by Fiske’s account, the early cybernetic models added the fact that

receivers were more actively a part of the communication process, but

their role remained confined to a transmission model typical of the

‘process schools’.^14

It was not until George Gerbner’s (1956) attempt at a general model

of communication that the process school was able to break out of some

of its more positivist underpinnings (i.e. that a medium is a transparent

carrier of messages, and that the content of messages is objectively given,

waiting to be faithfully reproduced).

In his model, the meaning of any given message is culturally relative

as individual perceptions will order and make sense of a communication

event in different ways according to the most familiar cultural frame-

works available. The other major departure from the hypodermic model

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