Recasting broadcast in terms of medium theory
By far the strongest case for medium theory is the way in which we can
reappraise broadcast media in a consolidated fashion. Just as, McLuhan
argues, old media become the content of a new medium, so too the medi-
ums that are made possible by old media can be viewed in a new way.
Human-made environments remain unperceived by individuals ‘during
the period of their innovation. When they have been superseded by other
environments, they tend to become visible’ (McLuhan and Fiore, 2001: 17).
From the vantage point of second-generation medium theory, we can
also look at some of the older media theorists and recast their work as
‘medium theories’ of broadcast media. This is what I attempted in
Chapter 3 in explaining Althusser’s theory of ideology, Debord’s account
of the media spectacle, Baudrillard’s account of the simulacrum and the
later accounts of audience studies each as versions of medium theory.
However, as we shall see in the next chapter, second-generation
media theory needs to be distinguished from the fact that ‘transmission’
and content views of New Media have also been renewed in contempo-
rary analysis. The study of language on the Internet, of cues-filtered-out
approaches and of interaction views of CMC are each examples of such
perspectives (see Table 4.2). Similarly, audience studies continues to grow
as a field of media studies, but now with a renewed emphasis on the frag-
mented audience as well as the populist but flawed notion that the
Internet commands an ‘audience’.
Both broadcast and network forms of communicative action can be
studied from the point of view of their content or their medium quality. In
the next chapter we will see how what is common to all content (trans-
mission) views is that they take as their building block face-to-face interac-
tionand assess all communication, no matter how abstract, according to
how successfully it reproduces the features of such interaction.^27
Transmission theories are, as suggested in the earlier discussion of
extension, only interested in how a medium may enable the continuation
of face-to-face kinds of cognitive communication across time and space.
They are not interested in how such extension introduces entirely new quali-
tieswhich are not possible within face-to-face communication, a property
that is common to both broadcast and interactive technology. The latter is
the specialization of medium theory.
This basic distinction between the two methodologies is also related to
divergent perceptions of the function of communication in social life. For the
content theorists, it is cognitive interaction, but for the medium theorists,
it is increasingly a matter of social integration by way of media rituals. The
turn to ritual communication is central to second-generation medium
theory. As we shall see, in media societies, attachment to mediums can be
much more powerful that attachment to other people. Indeed, as a basis for
community, these mediums will always be there, from cradle to grave,
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