Media, Society, World

Social Theory and Digital Media Practice

Nick Couldry

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745680767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply. Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important to understand those implications. This book takes on this challenge. Drawing on Couldry's fifteen years of work on media and social theory, this book explores how questions of power and ritual, capital and social order, and the conduct of political struggle, professional competition, and everyday life, are all transformed by today's complex combinations of traditional and 'new' media. In the concluding chapters Couldry develops a framework for global comparative research into media and for thinking collectively about the ethics and justice of our lives with media. The result is a book that is both a major intervention in the field and required reading for all students of media and sociology.

1

Introduction: Digital Media and Social Theory

Media suffuse our sense – our various senses – of living in a world: a social world, an imaginative world, the world of global politics and confrontation. Until the end of the fifteenth century, wrote historian Fernand Braudel, the life of mankind was divided into ‘different planets’, each occupying regions of the earth’s surface, but out of effective contact with each other.¹ Many factors (economic, political, military) and many processes (trade, transport, measurement) contributed to the making of the world we take for granted today, but it is media that instal that world as ‘fact’ into everyday routines, and in ever-changing ways. News of US President Lincoln’s assassination took twelve days to cross the Atlantic in 1865,² but in early 2011, world audiences could spend their lunch breaks following a live political crisis in Arab states fuelled, in part, by transnational TV coverage and online social networks.

Half a century ago, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton asked what were ‘the effects of the existence of media in our society’.³ They had in mind a national society, and nation-states remain of crucial importance to many questions, from control over the movement of people to legal capacity and the regulation of telecommunications. But ‘society’ can no longer be confined within national boundaries. Indeed, the concept of ‘society’ – the ‘whole’ of which, as social beings, we regard ourselves as part – has in recent years been rethought: societies are no longer, as Anthony Giddens put it, ‘wholes’, but levels of relative ‘systemness’ which emerge against the background of many other flows and relationships that cross or ignore national borders.⁴ Media’s social consequences must therefore be examined in relation to both society and world.

This book uses social theory to think about everyday experiences of media in the early twenty-first century. Such experience is inevitably marked by big media whose history has been so important to modernity’s shared worlds, but it is not limited to them; indeed, the increasing interface between person-to-person media and what formerly were called ‘mass’ media is possibly the most radical change now under way. Behind this huge change lies an even bigger transformation of human action. If all media are ‘spaces of action’ that ‘attempt … to connect what is separated’ (Siegfried Zielinski), then the internet extends this feature. The internet’s global connectivity creates a sense of the world as, for the first time in history, ‘a single social and cultural setting’.⁵

Media, as a term, is ambiguous. ‘Media’ refers to institutions and infrastructures that make and distribute particular contents in forms that are more or less fixed and carry their context with them, but ‘media’ are also those contents themselves. Either way, the term links fundamentally to the institutional dimensions of communication, whether as infrastructure or content, production or circulation.⁶ Digital media comprise merely the latest phase of media’s contribution to modernity, but the most complex of all, a complexity illustrated by the nature of the internet as a network of networks that connects all types of communication from one-to-one to many-to-many into a wider ‘space’ of communication.⁷ Media have become flexible and interconnected enough to make our only starting point the ‘media environment’, not specific media considered in isolation.⁸

The internet is the institutionally sustained space of interaction and information storage developed since the early 1960s. The internet only became an everyday phenomenon through the World Wide Web protocols that link hypertext documents into a working system that were conceived first by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, launched in 1991, but only began to enter everyday use in 1993–4. The internet’s fundamental property is an end-to-end architecture neatly summarized by Clay Shirky: ‘the internet is just a set of agreements about how to move data between two points,’⁹ that is, any two points in information space. With the advent of mobile internet access, those points can be accessible by social actors anywhere in physical space. The internet’s consequences for social theory are therefore radical. Online connection changes the space of social action, since it is interactive, draws on reports of interactions elsewhere and puts them to use in still further interactions. In this way, the internet creates an effectively infinite reserve for human action whose existence changes the possibilities of social organization in space everywhere.¹⁰ Action at any site can link prospectively to action elsewhere, drawing, in turn, on actions committed anywhere else; and all those connections are open to commentary and new connections from other points in space. As US religious scholar David Morgan notes, the photos of torture by US army personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 were one of the most extraordinary recent examples of the expanded social circulation that digital media make possible.¹¹ Performances and perceptions of the social acquire a new elasticity, even if the consequences that flow from this are highly conditioned still by local contexts and resources. Media today are a key part of how agents ‘grasp … environment as reality’.¹²

Canadian communication theorist Harold Innis once distinguished between ‘space-biased’ and ‘time-biased’ media.¹³ The internet is certainly space-biased because it changes communications’ movement across space not just by extension, but in terms of complexity: the folding of internet information-space into everyday action-space requires a different understanding of what can be done where and by whom. If so, then Innis’s contrasting notion of ‘time-biased media’ (the inscription, the papyrus) recedes into inaccessibility in a world where both space and time are transformed by the reserve of the internet.

Metaphors of media change

Media’s importance for society and world cannot be grasped as linear development.¹⁴ When media are embedded in wider cultural and social processes, tensions and contradictions result. Marcel Proust, in his great novel In Search of Lost Time, describes his narrator’s first telephone call but folds into the description the memory of many later calls:

as soon as our call has rung out … a tiny sound, an abstract sound – the sound of distance overcome – and the voice of the dear one speaks to us … But how far away it is! How often I have been unable to listen without anguish, as though … I felt more clearly the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity, and at what distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near – in actual separation!¹⁵

In this account of private pain enacted through a communication technology, Proust captures an ambiguity inherent to media’s role in everyday life – ‘a real presence … in actual separation!’ – even if, now the telephone has been transformed almost beyond recognition, we no longer feel that tension the way Proust did.¹⁶ Raymond Williams also had a sense of modern media’s ambiguities: ‘much of the content of modern communications … is a form of unevenly shared consciousness of persistently external events. It is what appears to happen, in these powerfully transmitted and mediated ways, in a world with which we have no other perceptible connections but which we feel is at once central and marginal to our lives.’¹⁷

There is no way back to a world before the transformations that Proust and Williams discuss: those transformations are built into our assumptions about what, and how, the world is. And yet the results of what we now call ‘traditional’ (mid-twentieth century) media remained puzzling long after they had become the background of daily life. One way of reading Don DeLillo’s 1999 epic novel Underworld is as a series of meditations on television and radio’s role in sustaining, and troubling, the myth of American society.¹⁸

Many further transformations have occurred since DeLillo wrote. First of all, the sheer proliferation of television and other images themselves: ‘life experience has become an experience in the presence of media’. Then, the rise of continuous mobile communication on a second-to-second basis, the overlaying online of broadcast and interpersonal communications, the ability of anyone to make and distribute media contents through what Manuel Castells calls ‘mass self-communication’. We are still trying to understand how these recent transformations will be integrated into everyday habit.¹⁹

Media transform the smallest details of individual actions and the largest spaces in which we are involved. Take search engines, now the focus of one of the world’s largest businesses, yet an unknown social form fifteen years ago. Google articulates for us ‘what there is’: it provides us routinely via its browser with what John Tomlinson calls ‘the instant and infinite availability of the world’s informational resources’. The positive side of this transformation is banally familiar: we ‘look things up’ very often not in books or directories, but by ‘googling it’. A lawyer friend tells me in passing that ‘the law is now on Google’; people check their children’s illness symptoms by typing them into Google; the director of the once familiar UK phone directory Yellow Pages admits that ‘nobody under 25 knows who we are’.²⁰

One particular story captures this transformation more vividly than any other. Five years ago, the scandal of a man’s faked death and his fraudulent escape with his wife gripped the UK press. A decisive moment came when a Daily Mirror reader proved the man’s ‘posthumous’ presence with his wife in Panama by typing ‘John and Mary and Panama’ into Google. Her comment was interesting: ‘I’m a sceptic. Nobody can simply vanish in this day and age, there has to be something, some sign.’²¹ This enterprising Google user captured the now familiar ambiguity of the internet: as means for individual discovery, collective contact and guaranteed mutual surveillance.

But how to grasp the impact of this and other parallel changes when embedded in daily life on every scale? Metaphors may help. One metaphor of the difference media make to the world is, following Roger Silverstone, a ‘dialectic’.²² The word ‘dialectic’ derives from the Greek for conversation and so captures how any conversation’s components remain separate from, though informed by, each other. All of us – individuals and groups – contribute something to this dialectic, through our media-informed assumptions about ‘what there is’ and ‘what can be done’; those contributions are not acts of individual choice, but shaped by largescale infrastructural changes, themselves driven by economic and other forces. A dialectical approach brings out the flexibility of how humans negotiate the differences that media make, and the traffic between media we have come to call ‘remediation’.²³

Does ‘dialectic’ capture the cumulative volume of media, and media’s resulting systemic impact on everyday life? Perhaps for that we need another metaphor: Todd Gitlin’s image of media as ‘torrent’, a ‘supersaturated’ flow of visuals and text that overwhelms us daily. A few years after Gitlin wrote, his image became integrated into the brand name Bit-Torrent, the software that allows large media files (TV programmes, films) to be shredded into bits and sent in countless parallel streams over the internet. But we do not grow accustomed to media’s wider ‘torrent’ because its scale and depth go on growing: even people’s comments about media now add to the flow through blogs, digg-it recommendations, YouTube mashups and tweets, all postdating Gitlin’s analysis. So the metaphor of a media ‘torrent’ only takes us so far, and this without even considering the saturation of today’s consumer environment by data sources and modes of information transmission such as RFID chips.²⁴

Here, t...