Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

This latter quality is central to understanding broadcast. The

performativity of broadcast derives not merely from its ‘live’ quality but

also from the fact that it can technically extend speech events to an almost

unlimited audience. When the news presenter says that ‘the world is in

shock’ because of the death of a member of the British royal family, there

is a sense in which this utterance is the event, more so than the actual

death. Of course, the utterance may rest on the truth of a state of affairs,

but what is never in dispute is that, at a certain hour, such a statement was

made to the world. When we are told the world is in shock, we, as audi-

ence members, are immediately enveloped by such an utterance, regard-

less of our attachment to the deceased royal. We may as well bein shock

in the sense of consummating what is likely to be the common state of all

audience members. The outpouring of mourning for Princess Diana was

almost entirely an effect of the powerful performativity of media.^18

Similarly, recall from Chapter 2 the widespread panic over a Martian

invasion as a result of Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the

Worlds.As a novel, H.G. Wells’ book could never have the same effect

precisely because it lacked the synchronous audience which electronic

broadcast and newspapers provide. Similarly, extended-interactive

communication can never constitute an event as broadcast does. Indeed

broadcast can be the event. This is particularly salient with broadcasted

mega-news, which takes on an historical status far more powerful than

any pre-broadcast events would ever allow.

The audio-visually documented assassination of John F. Kennedy levitated

him and his presidency into an historiographical mythosphere once occupied

only by the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. By contrast, William

McKinley never had a chance. The O.J. Simpson trial is assured a place in

the popular histor y of the twentieth-centur y American jurisprudence that few,

if any, Supreme Court rulings might hope to occupy; Judge Ito has already

eclipsed Oilver Wendell Holmes in recognition factor. Father Coughlin will

have generated far more usable material than Pope John XXIII, and Billy

Graham more than both. Who is likely to be a more dominant presence in

the digital archives? Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan? Dr Freud or Dr Ruth?

Charles Dar win or Pat Robertson? Mother Teresa already has a higher

F-Score than Albert Schweitzer. In the future the past will belong to the audio-

visually reproducible. The giants of the arts and sciences who, for whatever

reason, failed to climb the transmission towers of the twentieth centur y can

expect to be remaindered to the specialists’ bin. (Marc, 2000: 630)

Marc argues that it was the culture of broadcasting that made Elvis and

the Beatles possible: ‘They emerged from the night spots of Memphis and

Hamburg to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.In the cable environment,

however, The Ed Sullivan Showis no longer possible’ (630).

The foregoing examples serve to show that broadcast and network

communication are ontologically distinct – a distinction which has numer-

ous consequences for the kind of telecommunities that technologically

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