Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

In Arthur Kroker’s view, interactivity is not important; rather, what

is significant is that we live in a processed world in which all individuals

are essentially x-rayed by media:

For McLuhan, it’s a processed world now. As we enter the electronic age

with its instantaneous and global movement of information, we are the first

human beings to live completely within the mediated environment of the

technostructure. The ‘content’ of the technostructure is largely irrelevant

(the ‘content’ of a new technology is always the technique which has just

been superseded: movies are the content of television; novels are the con-

tent of movies) or, in fact, a red herring distracting our attention from the

essential secret of technology as the medium, or environment, within which

human experience is programmed. It was McLuhan’s special genius to

grasp at once that the content (metonymy) of new technologies ser ves as

a ‘screen’, obscuring from view the disenchanted locus of the technological

experience in its purely ‘formal’ or ‘spatial’ properties. McLuhan wished to

escape the ‘flat earth approach’ to technology, to invent a ‘new metaphor’

by which we might ‘restructure our thoughts and feelings’ about the sub-

liminal, imperceptible environments of media effects. (Kroker, 2001: 56–7)

But what of the distinction between broadcast and interactive soli-

darity? If broadcast is also a medium of interactivity, what is the standing

of these two forms as ‘mediums’. From McLuhan the Wired magazine

editors have taken up the idea of the Internet as an extension of con-

sciousness itself. Horrocks (2001) quotes McLuhan: ‘The next medium,

whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include

television as its content, not as its environment.. .’ (pp. 52–53). Here

McLuhan suggests television is itself a medium, and that whatever super-

sedes it will interiorize it. Certainly, cyber-utopians celebrate the idea that

the World Wide Web is a place where every netizen can broadcast their

own moving video or digital images. Paul Levinson (1999) suggests that

the Internet is a ‘meta-medium’ which includes ‘the written word in

forms ranging from love letters to newspapers, plus telephone, radio

(“RealAudio” on the Web), and moving images with sound which can be

considered a version of television’ (37–8).

This problem of medium is fruitfully explored by Joshua Meyrowitz

in his essay ‘Understandings of Media’ (1999). Meyrowitz argues that three

key metaphors have prevailed in the thinking of medium: medium-as-

vessel/conduit, medium-as-language and medium-as-environment (44).

The first kind of metaphor, medium-as-vessel/conduit, is the most

common. It is a metaphor in which a medium is regarded as a container

for sending or storing content. It leads people to ask: ‘What is the content?

How did the content get there? How accurately does the media content

reflect “reality”? How do people interpret the content? What effects does

the content have?’ (45). For Meyrowitz, this metaphor is so prevalent

because it appears to transcend both mediated and unmediated interac-

tion. It provides for intentionality across different media: ‘We all have a

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