18 But of course, this performativity was also only made possible because of the historical
accumulation of the image of Princess Diana, the most photographed woman in world
history, which had transformed her into an icon.
19 According to Robert Nisbet (1970):The mass is a large aggregate of people, which may or may not be in physical
union, in which the unifying force is some single, usually simple, interest or idea.
The television public is a mass, the crowd at a football game is a mass; the
people brought together in part of a city by an incident, or report of an incident,
are a mass. ... It is the essence of the mass, as Simmel obser ved, that it is built
around a single interest or aim, one involving but a part of the individual’s whole
nature, and that it is animated or guided by only simpleideas. (94)20 On the continued popularity of the regular networks in the USA, see Buzzard (2003: 207)
and Dizard (2000: 82). According to Meyrowitz, in 1990, when cable TV was experienc-
ing a crest in the USA, ‘cable households spent more than half their viewing time watch-
ing “regular” network programming and... the most frequent use of VCR’s is for time
shifting of programs broadcast for network-affiliated stations’ (Meyrowitz, 1990: 467).
21 However, in their discussion of this function, they fail to point out how this character-
istic is also endemic to radio and newsprint.
22 See the collection by Newcomb (2000) for a sample of the everyday use of TV as
medium.
23 Marc claims that ‘broadcasting’ as an industry in the USA can be divided into radio
(c. 1925–55) and television (c. 1955–85) in which ‘[e]ach survived the brief golden age by
reconditioning its programming to supplement, complement, and otherwise accommo-
date the new medium that was eclipsing it’ (637).
24 The closest Horrocks gets to this is in suggesting that the Internet meets all of the crite-
ria for McLuhan’s posthumously published account of the tetrad, whereby the transi-
tion from one medium to another can be measured according to a limited number of
questions (see Horrocks, 2001: 60, 61, 79).
25 McLuhan, as Meyrowitz acknowledges, is the principal exponent of media as environ-
ment (see McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 26).
26 These markers for defining a medium-as-environment discussed by Meyrowitz bear a
remarkable likeness to some of the indicators of social solidarity discussed by
Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society (1984). Intensity, rigidity, Elements 1 and 3,
underlie two dominant bases for how community tends to be discussed, by either
recognition or reciprocity.
27 Even medium views are sometimes accused of this. For example, Horrocks (2001) claims
that:Arguably, in McLuhan’s paradigm, even the medium of television relies on this
same metaphysical ghost of presence. Indeed, to go further, we could say with
Derrida that the virtual reality environment is itself crucially dependent on main-
taining presence and the immediacy of speech (the virtual discourse insists on
the claim “you are reallythere”). (30)The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 121Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 121