Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Broadcast is the only medium that is capable of being ‘live’

The medium alone makes the event – and does this whatever the contents,

whether conformist or subversive. Serious problem for all counter-

information, pirate radios, anti-media, etc. (Baudrillard, 1983: 101)

In the section above on technological extension we discussed how, in

enabling the continuation of face-to-face kinds of cognitive communica-

tion across time and space, electronic and broadcast media also introduce

entirely new qualities of interaction which are not possible within face-to-

face communication.

Datacasting on the Internet lacks one paramount quality that tele-

vision and radio and newspapers possess – that of being ‘live’. When we

say an image is ‘live’, it usually refers to the fact of there being no sepa-

ration between the time of production of a message and the time of its

reception, such as the coverage of a sporting fixture. This is known as

‘real-time’ and may exist in broadcast or interactive contexts. However,

there is a sense in which only electronic broadcasts are always ‘live’.

Whatever the temporal origin of the content of a media broadcast, what

makes it live is the fact that it is simultaneously being experienced by

a mass audience whose very quality as a mass is constituted by the

broadcast itself.^14 The intensity of the ‘liveness’ operating in a broadcast

event is also related to the size of the audience, and its capability of

immediacy – the fact that it may be showing real-time footage or that

such footage might be able to intercede at any moment. Much has been

made of the difference between cinema and television precisely around

the liveness differential. Flitterman-Lewis (1992) suggests that television

succeeds in the production of ‘presentness’ in a way that film cannot. It

offers a ‘here and now’ in opposition to cinemas’s ‘there and then’ (218).

Television’s ‘peculiar form of presentness’ founds its triumphal claims

to immediacy:

You should think of television per forming its most distinctive function, the

live transmission of events. ... Unlike cinema the sequence of the actual

event cannot be reversed when shown on television. ... The now of the tele-

vision event is equal to the now of the actual event in terms of objective

time, that is, the instantaneous perception by the obser ver of the actual

event and by the television viewer. (Zettl, 1973: 263)

Zettl’s specification of this distinctive function, however, goes only

part of the way towards understanding broadcast. In casting a television

broadcast in terms of a representation of a live event, questions of realism,

and bandwidth (i.e. TV versus radio) also necessarily come up. The point

is successfully made that only in such a transmission do the time-world

of the represented event and the time-world of the viewership coincide.

However, the ‘nowness’ view of ‘liveness’ falls short of understanding

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