MediaSpace

Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age

Nick Couldry, Anna McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134436347
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media Space explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spacial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the Internet to the shopping mall.

Part I

MEDIA THEORY/
SPATIAL THEORY

1

THE DOUBLING OF PLACE
Electronic media, time-space arrangements and social relationships

Shaun Moores

Introduction: place pluralized, not marginalized

The title of this chapter is a phrase borrowed from the work of a theorist and historian of broadcasting, Paddy Scannell (1996).¹ For Scannell (1996: 172), one of the remarkable (‘magical’) yet now largely taken-for-granted consequences of radio and television use is what he calls the ‘doubling of place’. His idea that these media serve to ‘ “double” reality’ is developed in an analysis of the distinctive character of public events (and of ‘being-in-public’) in late modern life: ‘Public events now occur, simultaneously, in two different places: the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. Broadcasting mediates between these two sites’ (Scannell 1996: 76). In proposing a ‘phenomenological approach’ to the study of radio and television (see also Scannell 1995), which is concerned in part with the ‘ways of being in the world’ (Scannell 1996: 173) that have been created for viewers and listeners, he goes on to argue that, for audience members in their multiple, dispersed, local settings, there are transformed ‘possibilities of being: of being in two places at once’ (ibid.: 91). Of course, it is only ever possible for any individual to be in one place at a time physically, but broadcasting nevertheless permits a ‘live’ witnessing of remote happenings that can bring these happenings experientially ‘close’ or ‘within range’, thereby removing the ‘farness’ (ibid.: 167).²

I want to suggest in this chapter that Scannell’s concept of the doubling of place and his reflections on the altered ‘possibilities of being’ for media users, while they appear in a book devoted to the study of broadcasting, might also be applied more generally in the analysis of those electronic media, such as the Internet and telephone, which share with radio and television a capacity for the virtually instantaneous transmission of information across sometimes vast spatial distances. Broadcasting, as Scannell has shown, has its own characteristic communicative features, which serve to distinguish it in various ways from computer-mediated or telephone communication (allowing for the fact that presenters of programmes are increasingly encouraging their viewers and listeners to email or phone-in). However, radio and television can be considered alongside the Internet and telephone precisely because of the common potential that all these media have for constructing experiences of simultaneity, liveness and ‘immediacy’ in what have been termed ‘non-localized’ (Thompson 1995: 246) (I prefer the term ‘trans-localized’) spaces and encounters.³

In my view, there are a number of advantages to be gained from grouping these electronic media together in a single field of investigation. Such a field could be a valuable site of connection between studies of so-called ‘new media’, always ‘a historically relative term’ (Marvin 1988: 3), and of more established modes of electronically mediated communication, including the use of an ‘old technology’ like the (static) telephone. Additionally, it could help to bridge a problematic gap between the existing academic areas of ‘mass’ and ‘interpersonal’ communications, and to raise questions about the limits of a ‘circuit’ model of culture that relies on distinguishing institutional moments of production and consumption. While this model has been employed in the analysis of broadcasting (for example, see Moores 1997), it turns out to be far less helpful when attempting to understand what is going on between the participants in Internet ‘chat’ or in telephone conversations, where the positions of ‘performers’ and ‘audiences’ may be constantly shifting as they typically do in local face-to-face interactions.⁴

The work of Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) would have to be a foundational text in the field of investigation I am outlining here. His pioneering book on electronic media makes a seemingly improbable link between Erving Goffman’s sociology, which was concerned among other things with the ‘definition of the situation’ in instances of social interaction (see especially Goffman 1959), and the ‘medium theory’ of Marshall McLuhan (see especially McLuhan 1964), which related the development of media technologies to time-space transformations. Bringing together their rather different perspectives, Meyrowitz (1985: 6) asserts that: ‘Electronic media affect us … not primarily through their content, but by changing the “situational geography” of social life.’ He advances a theory of ‘situations as information-systems’ (see also Meyrowitz 1994), in which the emphasis is on how ‘patterns of information flow’ serve to define the situation. This argument does not invalidate the work done by Goffman and others on co-present interaction in physical settings; rather it ‘extends the study of situations’ to include a range of encounters in and with ‘media “settings”’ (Meyrowitz 1985: 37–8).

Clearly, Meyrowitz’s reflections on the altered ‘situational geography’ of social life correspond in some respects with what Scannell has to say about the time-space arrangements of broadcasting, but whereas Scannell points to the doubling of place, Meyrowitz suggests that cultures in our ‘electronic society’ are ‘relatively placeless’ in comparison with those of previous social orders (the phrase in the title of his book is ‘no sense of place’). As he explains, this title is intended as a ‘serious pun’ in which place can be understood to mean ‘both social position and physical location’ (Meyrowitz 1985: 308). His main thesis is that social roles and hierarchies, through which people have traditionally come to ‘know their place’, are being transformed as electronically mediated communication transcends the boundaries of physical settings, making these boundaries more ‘permeable’. To take a dramatic example used to illustrate the general thesis, he states that: ‘A telephone or computer in a ghetto tenement or in a suburban teenager’s bedroom is potentially as effective as a telephone or computer in a corporate suite’ (ibid.: 169–70).

Whether or not we accept Meyrowitz’s perspective on the transformation of place as ‘social position’ (quite frankly, I feel this particular aspect of his theory tends to overestimate the degree of change; see also Leyshon 1995: 33–4), there is still a problem with the suggestion that place as ‘physical location’ is of little or no consequence today, and that it is therefore necessary for us to move ‘beyond place’ in theorizing communication and culture. The boundaries of place, in the second sense of the word here, are certainly more permeable or ‘open’ (Massey 1995) than they were in the past, and it is also the case that, as Anthony Giddens (1990: 17–21) explains, the social organization of time and space has been abstracted or ‘pulled away’ from locales in conditions of modernity, yet this does not necessarily lead to the loss of a sense of place. Indeed, Scannell (1996: 141) accuses Meyrowitz of not putting enough emphasis on the locales of broadcasting, ‘above all the studio’, from which distant viewers and listeners in numerous other places are addressed. Furthermore, via the Internet, there is the creation of what have been called ‘virtual places’ in ‘cyberspace’ (for example, Mitchell 1995: 21–2) or ‘text-based virtual realities’ (Turkle 1996a: 15), media settings for social interaction that might best be seen as ‘overlaying’ the physical locations of those computer users who access them.

My preference, then, is for a conception of place as pluralized (not marginalized, as Meyrowitz would have it) by electronic media use. As Nick Couldry (2000: 30) asks, ‘Why not argue that media coverage massively multiplies the interconnections between places, rather than weakening our sense of place?’ In turn, once we recognize the ‘hitherto impossible possibility of being in two places … at once’ (Scannell 1996: 172), it is necessary for us to recognize that social relationships can be pluralized too. There are opportunities in late modern life, at least for those with the economic and cultural resources to access relevant technologies of electronically mediated communication, for relating instantaneously to a wide range of spatially remote others, as well as to any proximate others in the physical settings of media use. Both these sorts of ‘relating to others’ (Duck 1999) merit serious consideration, as does the complex interplay between them. This potential pluralizing of relationships also raises some further issues to do with the ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman 1959) or with ‘performing identity’ (Cameron 1997) in and across multiple social realities (see Schutz 1973).

With a view to illustrating and extending the introductory comments made here, concerning electronic media, time-space arrangements and social relationships, I want to devote the rest of this chapter to a discussion of three brief accounts of media use (drawn from recently published research). Each of the selected accounts features a different electronic medium, but all offer examples of what, following Scannell, could be termed a doubling of place.

Public events and the interruption of routine

The first of these accounts is a quotation found in Robert Turnock’s study of British television viewers’ responses to news of the death and coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997:

My family and I watched the entire funeral. My husband has his own business, but he was shut for the day as a mark of respect … we just felt it was the appropriate thing to do. At times it was difficult because we have a thirteen-month-old baby and sometimes he got bored, so we took it in turns to entertain him. We watched BBC1 until she reached her final resting place around 2.15 p.m. We stayed at home in our breakfast room, drinking tea and crying. It did not feel right to go out on such a sad day.

(Turnock 2000: 99)

Perhaps the main theme in this written account is the suspension or interruption of routine. Its author tells of her husband’s business being ‘shut for the day as a mark of respect’, of watching one television channel for hours on end, of remaining in their ‘breakfast room’ until the afternoon and of staying indoors because it ‘did not feel right to go out on such a sad day’. I will come shortly to a discussion of why she and her family (with the exception of the 13-month-old baby) might have felt that way about the death of a public figure they had never met face-to-face, ‘in person’, but to begin with it is necessary to say something about how the ‘eventfulness’ of public events is intimately bound up with the ‘dailiness’ that it disturbs, if only temporarily.

Scannell (1996: 149) asserts that dailiness is the key ‘organizing principle’ of broadcasting, and that the principal challenge for broadcasters is to provide ‘a daily service that fills each day, that runs right through the day, that appears as a continuous … never-ending flow – through all the hours of the day, today, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, in such a way that viewers and listeners can come to feel ‘entitled’ to expect it as a reliable, familiar and predictable aspect of their days (as ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘available’, in phenomenological terms). In contrast, eventful happenings like the death of Diana, who was a relatively young member of the British royal family, or to take a more recent example, the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre in 2001, are unexpected, ‘occasional things’ that ‘show up’ as eventful ‘against a background of uneventful everyday existence’. (Having said that, some eventful occasions are planned and anticipated well in advance, forming part of a national or global calendar of events, and it is precisely the role of news to try to ‘routinize eventfulness’ as an ‘everyday phenomenon’ [Scannell 1996: 160].) Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992: 5), introducing a study of what they refer to as ‘media events’, one case of which was Diana’s wedding ceremony years before, make an argument that is similar to Scannell’s: ‘The most obvious difference between media events and other … genres of broadcasting is that they are, by definition, not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives.’

The ‘normal flow’ of broadcasting, as Dayan and Katz refer to it, has its source in the seriality of programming (soap opera is perhaps the best example of this serial form), and in the cyclical or recursive organization of the schedules (Scannell 1995: 7). In turn, television scheduling is typically designed to match a channel’s ‘mixed’ programme output with the projected flow of day-to-day lives, the routinized ‘time-space paths’ (see Giddens 1984: 113) along which potential viewers in different social positions are assumed to be moving.⁵ Television viewing is usually, though not exclusively (see McCarthy 2001), carried out in household contexts, where attention to particular programmes has often been divided and contested (a classic qualitative study of television’s uses in the home is Morley 1986). It is in such a setting that the family in the first account is watching television, and the problem of having to ‘entertain’ a bored baby is typical of the kind of mundane distractions that viewers face in their routine domestic circumstances. Indeed, some television programmes, especially those shown at times of the day, like breakfast time, when people’s physical presence in front of the screen is unpredictable, assume a distracted viewer who will drop in and out of the highly fragmented broadcast.

Let me return now to a question raised earlier, which is asked by Turnock (2000: 35) himself: ‘How is it possible to grieve over someone that you have never met?’⁶ I should make it clear at this point that many of the respondents featured in Turnock’s research data did not report feelings of grief, but others (including the author of this account) do seem to have experienced great upset over Diana’s death. Answering Turnock’s question requires an understanding of the role of electronic media, and broadcasting in particular, in the construction of ‘celebrity’. It also invites reflection on the ways in which relations of familiarity and estrangement today are ‘mapped’ onto the changing situational geography of social life. For instance, Giddens (1999: 11–12), commenting on the significance of Nelson Mandela as a ‘global celebrity’, notes that when Mandela’s image ‘may be more familiar to us than the face of our next-door neighbour, something has changed in the nature of our everyday experience’. Similarly, although she was a member (by marriage) of the British royal family rather than a political leader, Diana was ‘known’ to millions around the world through her frequent media appearances. Her ‘performance of “ordinariness” ’ (Couldry 2001: 231) in media settings, despite the fact that she occupied a quite extraordinary social position, may help, in part, to explain the sense of loss felt by some people following her death (see also Kear and Steinberg 1999).

Writing several years ago, John Langer (1981: 355) remarked that most television personalities have a ‘ “will to ordinariness”, to be accepted, normalized, experienced as familiar’. This includes not just show hosts, news readers and soap opera actors, but also politicians and other public figures who (often on the ad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction: Orientations: Mapping Mediaspace
• Part I: Media Theory/Spatial Theory
• Part II: Work, Leisure and the Spaces In-Between
• Part III: New Media Spaces