Media Convergence

The Three Degrees of Network, Mass, and Interpersonal Communication

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000545623
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

This second edition furthers conversations about the ongoing society-wide and worldwide digitalization of human communication.

Reviewing the long lines in the history of media and communication – from writing via printing and broadcasting to computing – the book lays out three general types of media: the human body enabling face-to-face communication here and now; the technically reproduced means of mass communication across space and time; and the digital technologies integrating one-to-one, one-to-many, as well as many-to-many interactions. All these communicative practices coexist in contemporary media environments. Across cultures, genders, and age groups, people go on communicating in the flesh, via wires, and over the air, as illustrated though case studies of mobile communication on mundane matters, and of climate change as a global challenge for human communication and coexistence.

The second edition includes:

• Updated accounts of research and public debate on digital media and communication
• Analyses of current social media and an emerging internet of things
• Systematic presentations of digital as well as traditional empirical methods
• Discussion of the normative implications of digitalization, including the classic rights of information and communication, and a right not to be communicated about through surveillance

Interdisciplinary in scope to showcase the wide-reaching cultural consequences of media convergence, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the fields of media, communication, and cultural studies.

part IA critique of communication

doi: 10.4324/9781003199601-1

1Communication – the very idea

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199601-2

Media as utopias and dystopias

New media have historically given rise to utopian as well as dystopian perspectives on the role of communication in society – from Plato’s concern that writing would promote forgetfulness rather than memory and wisdom, via recurring debates about print and broadcast media as instruments of either enlightenment and education or entertainment and escapism, to accounts from the 1990s of the internet and other digital media as resources for enhanced public participation in politics, economy, and culture, followed by renewed concerns since the 2010s over online misinformation and both commercial and state surveillance. The very idea of communication has been informed over time by the available media, and by the hopes and fears associated with them. As demonstrated by John Durham Peters (1999) in his agenda-setting history of the idea, communication was only recognized as a general category of human activity following the rise of electronic communication media from the last half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the telegraph (see further Peters, 2015).¹ These developments encouraged scholars and other commentators to think of diverse practices of social interaction – in the flesh, via wires, and over the air – in terms of their family resemblances, as communication. In Peters’ (1999: 6) felicitous formulation, “mass communication came first.” With digitalization, the idea of communication has, once again, been called into question. For more than two decades, research has been struggling to understand what comes after mass communication.

In this book, I take the most recent generation of ‘new,’ digital forms of media, typified first by the personal computer, next by the mobile phone, and most recently by an internet of things, as an opportunity to revisit the idea of communication, and to develop a framework for studying communicative practices across media of three different degrees²: the human body enabling communication face-to-face; the technically reproduced means of analog mass communication; and the digital technologies facilitating networked interaction one-to-one, one-to-many, as well as many-to-many. The approach seeks to avoid, on the one hand, the increasingly untenable divides of mass versus interpersonal communication, and of online versus offline interaction. Occasionally implying a dichotomy of technologically mediated versus ‘non-mediated’ or face-to-face communication, the field of communication research has tended to produce separate bodies of mass and interpersonal communication studies (Rogers, 1999). The dichotomy reappeared with a vengeance in ‘new media’ studies of the 1990s, when cyberspaces and virtual realities came to be conceived of as worlds apart (Bell & Kennedy, 2000; Benedikt, 1991; Jones, 1998). On the other hand, the book aims to counter a second widespread notion in research, policy, and public debate, namely, that previously distinct technologies are all being merged seamlessly into shared platforms and similar formats in a sweeping process of media convergence through digitalization, and that the sum of media might even be displacing face-to-face contact. Old media rarely die, and humans remain the reference point and prototype for technologically mediated communication.

My aim is to synthesize and systematize a wide range of contributions to scholarship, inside and outside the media and communications field, and to outline an agenda for further studies, including some of the inherently normative implications of both the practice and the study of communication. Communication configures society. Communication also prefigures society, addressing what is, but also what is not (yet), what could be, what ought to be, and what should be done. Communication supports great leaps of the individual imagination and grand collective projects. Communication articulates alternatives and choices. Human communication constitutes a window of opportunity between chance and necessity.

The end of communication

We seem to be endlessly communicating, and to generally trust in the positive potentials of communication. As long as people are talking, we say, at least they are not fighting. While the early motto of ‘information wants to be free’³ relating to file-sharing and peer production (Brand, 1987) has remained contested on legal as well as ideological grounds, a motto of ‘communication wants to go on’⁴ has appeared uncontroversial for decades. In the political domain, Michael Schudson (1997: 307) critiqued a resulting “romance of conversation” that tends to confuse ordinary sociable conversation with problem-solving conversation, which is of a formal, rule-governed, and public nature. It is counterproductive, to the point of undermining political democracy itself, to think of public debate among citizens as just another conversation among either intimates or strangers. Democracies also need experts to examine and lay out complex issues, so that citizens may make informed decisions in their own best interest (Schudson, 2006). At least as far as democracy is concerned, the response to the familiar rhetorical question, ‘Can’t we just talk about it?’ must be: No.

This book refocuses attention on the end of communication – its translation into locally and globally coordinated actions. Communication serves to manage extreme cognitive and cultural complexities for endless practical purposes. Communication, accordingly, comes with a deadline, imposed on communicators by their natural as well as cultural and social circumstances. The end of communication is to end⁵: ideally, having been enlightened and empowered through communication, individuals, groups, and institutions as well as entire societies and cultures go on to act.

Certainly, communication often has inherent value. Communicative practices range from the mundane to the extraordinary – from getting by and going on in the private and public contexts of our everyday lives by asking questions and telling jokes, to transcending ourselves in elaborate aesthetic make-believe and organizing ourselves for political revolution. We resume communication, and we repeat ourselves. An end-of-communication perspective implies neither a narrowly instrumental approach to human communication as just another means to an end, nor a general faith in the capacity of communicators to agree in the end. Frequently, we agree to disagree. Communications end, however, whether by explicit procedure or as contingent outcome, sometimes behind communicators’ backs.

Communication constitutes both a natural and a cultural resource. It has provided the human species with a distinctive evolutionary advantage as well as a precondition for civilized interaction within and between cultures, even if its potential may not be actualized. According to evolutionary biology, human consciousness is defined, in part, by its unique capacity for simulation, including models of itself in externalized and exchangeable forms (Dawkins, 1989: 59). The positive potential of communication can be understood in terms of the doubt and delay that it introduces into human activities, enabling reflection and negotiation – in the short or long term, through fiction, science, and other forms of experimentation – before individuals, groups, and entire societies do things that have irreversible, and often unpredictable, consequences. Communication represents the human capacity to jointly consider how things might be different, to be constructively critical, and to deliberate on alternatives.⁶

Communication involves contestation, mostly of trivial things, sometimes of momentous matters. Philosophy has spoken of “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie, 1956), for example, ‘freedom’ or ‘art,’ whose implications remain intensely debated, even if most people agree about their core meaning. As noted by Clarke (1979), an additional distinction should be made between what is contested as a matter of fact, and what is contestable.⁷ This distinction was illustrated in the so-called breaching experiments of the ethnomethodological research tradition (Garfinkel, 1967) – for instance, behaving like a guest in one’s own home – which brought out the arbitrary, yet extremely practical routines of everyday social interaction. We may question anything, anytime, but then again, we mostly do not, because it would be irrelevant or impractical. Like the very idea of science (Woolgar, 1988), or of conceptual schemes (Davidson, 1973–1974), the very idea of communication is contestable, but it is mostly not contested in either research or ordinary conversation. It is, not least, when new media are introduced that the concept of communication comes to be contested.

Both spoken language and other signs and symbols enable us to communicate about that which is not present in immediate space, time, or experience. “In the writings of Aristotle we find explicitly stated for the first time the conception of a sign as an observed event or state of affairs that is evidence for its interpreter for what is at least temporarily absent” (D. S. Clarke, 1990: 11). In one of the first attempts at a grand theory of communication, Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson (1987/1951: 209) noted the human capacity to identify the signals emitted by other organisms as signals – signals of something else and signals for somebody. Speech sounds and gestures provide access to various possible worlds that can be shared with others in communication. Present signs allow for absent realities. Writing, print, electronic, and digital media, each in specific ways, have radically extended the capacity of humans to imagine, represent, and communicate about possible as well as ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Note on the text
• part I A critique of communication
• part II Media of three degrees
• part III The double hermeneutics of media and communication research
• References
• Index