Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

(one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many) as well as individual

communication technologies, from print to radio and TV and the burgeon-

ing proliferation of New Media.

Medium theory’s recovery has also been accompanied by a growing

adoption of ritual accounts of communication. Ritual views of communi-

cation contend that individuals exchange understandings not out of self-

interest nor for the accumulation of information but from a need for

communion, commonality and fraternity. Ritual views may be micro or

macro. The micro-view looks at individual attachments to objects, and the

rituals people have with them, whereas the macro-view examines attach-

ment to the mediums which these objects provide access to. As we will see

in Chapter 6, in media societies, the micro-level attachment to media tech-

nologies is of an intensity which far exceeds other kinds of attachment,

including with other human beings. However, at the macro level, attach-

ment to social life and community becomes realized through these

mediums – as virtual communities or broadcast/audience communities.

What is common to all ritual views, is that they suggest that medi-

ums are not ‘used’ for the purposes of social interaction, but are, instead,

forms of social integration. Each medium, conceived either as a technical

environment or as a form of social connection, is able to facilitate a sense

of belonging, security and community, even if individuals are not actually

directly interacting in them. When we leave a television on in the back-

ground even when we are not watching it, or download our electronic mail

when at work before engaging in face-to-face contact, we are immersing

ourselves in forms of media integration.^1

However, as pointed out in the previous chapter, the overwhelming

view of the communication medium is as a conduit or vessel for the trans-

mission of sense, of content. This is overwhelming both in the everyday

common-sense understanding of communication as either ‘information’

or ‘entertainment’, and in research models into media, both old and new

(see Table 4.1).

In Chapter 3, we saw how audience effects analysis, hypodermic

needle models, media impact theories and computer-mediated communi-

cation approaches are each based on a transport view of communication.

But what is common to all transport views of communication is a pre-

dominant set of assumptions about the nature of ‘subjectivity’ or identity

that is involved in a communication process, and the nature of the ‘mes-

sages’ and meaning that are said to circulate between them. The pervasive

commitment to these assumptions, as it has evolved in Western traditions

of philosophy and in communication theory, is described by the philoso-

pher Jacques Derrida as ‘logocentrism’.

Logocentric communication

‘Logocentrism’ is a designation that has been developed by Derrida to char-

acterize how communication in the Western world has always been marked

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