Elsewhere, Meyrowitz suggests that the second and third kinds of
metaphor began to inform a whole second generation of medium theorists
in the 1990s including their thoughts on cyberculture. In 1994 Meyrowitz
suggested that ‘second generation medium theory’ began in the late 1980s
with a diverse range of analyses of media technologies. He pointed to the
fact that a diverse range of communication forms was beginning to be
looked at afresh from medium standpoints. Re-appraisals of photography,
computer networks, ‘smart machines’ electronic text, TV versus print, and
the relationship between communication technology, public space and
social change are listed as fields of second wave medium studies
(Meyrowitz, 1994: 69).
This second wave has consolidated itself in the renewed interest in the
work of McLuhan, Innis, Carey, Katz and others. Perspectives explored in
the previous chapter – on virtual community, virtual space and the renova-
tions of CMC analysis – can be counted as part of this wave. More recently,
the writings of Michel de Certeau, Margaret Morse and Karen Knorr-Certina
suggest new and important directions in medium theory. But the explosion
of literature on the interrelationship between New Media and the sociology
of time and space is also central here. Concepts of time-space compression
and ‘technological space-time’ (Harvey, 1989; Virilio, 1997), including ‘cyber-
space time’ (Lee and Liebenau, 2000; Nguyen and Alexander, 1996), are part
of this trend. The turn also to visual culture (see Evans and Hall, 1999) is a
departure but also a renewal of a regard for the image which had enabled
cultural studies to significantly redefine media studies.
Medium theory also has a number of recent theorists who take an
extreme view of medium-as-environment. Arthur Kroker (2001) exempli-
fies an excessive position in which ‘new media... are seen to be “new
nature”’, but is confused as to whether it is a metaphor or an environ-
ment. The take on McLuhan is that ‘technology is an “extension” of biol-
ogy: the expansion of the electronic media as the “metaphor” or
“environment” of twentieth-century experience implies that, for the first
time, the central nervous system itself has been exteriorized. It is our
plight to be processed through the technological simulacrum; to partici-
pate intensively and integrally in a “technostructure” which is nothing
but a vast simulation and “amplification” of the bodily senses’ (57).
Similarly, Paul Virilio is well known for his exaggeration of a version
of medium theory in recent writings on communication. In his case ‘new
nature’ does not compete with the old, but substitutes it.I think the infosphere – the sphere of information – is going to impose itself
on the geosphere. We are going to be living in a reduced world. The capacity
of interactivity is going to reduce the world, real space to nearly nothing.
Therefore, in the near future, people will have a feeling of being enclosed in a
small, confined, environment. In fact, there is already a speed pollution
which reduces the world to nothing. (Virilio, 1998: 21)The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 117Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 117