The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (10 page)

websites, CD pressing, color photocopying, video editing, etc. E-mail and the fax machine, which played a key role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and

dissident movements since, are a bane of repressive governments. The ease of

citizen production (and piracy) by-passes traditional gatekeepers. Titanic was

banned in Iran, yet it was almost instantly available there in bootleg versions, recorded by hand-held video cameras in movie theaters abroad. Music tends to

travel more readily than film or video, in part due to cheapness and the global

compatibility of playback technology. ``Small media'' such as tape cassettes,

samizdat carbon copies, or flyers can work more effectively for political agita-

tion than traditional, capital-hungry media such as the press and television. The heavy artillery of media touted by modernization theory, which require not only

capital investment but also a complex division of labor, vie with do-it-yourself media (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, 1994). As conceived by mod-ernizers such as Rostow, Lerner, and Schramm, literacy, newspapers, and

national broadcasting are the crown atop industrialization and infrastructural

development (roads, schools, hydroelectric dams). Instead, relatively cheap, oral media such as mobile phones, radios, and VCRs have spread in such non-industrialized regions as South Asia or the Middle East. The relative autonomy

of media from other modernization processes is a chief exhibit of the disjunctive character of globalization (Appadurai, 1996). Clearly, modernity is not a package deal.

Given shrinking cost and access to media production, how do we explain the

unprecedented concentration in media corporations? The long muckraking tra-

dition attacking media power that stretches from Upton Sinclair to Noam

Chomsky, with its doctrine that concentration of control means uniformity in

content, risks missing the curious ways that huge cultural industries have learned to allow, like the Catholic Church, all kinds of internal variety in cultural

production. Likewise, Adorno's classic analysis of the integrated culture industry was quite apt for Hollywood in the 1940s, when vertical integration of film

production, distribution, and exhibition was at its height, but finds only partial resonance today. Corporate power should be a foremost issue on the agenda of

media studies, but modi operandi have changed. The recording industry majors,

for instance, are not the monolithic trusts of yore. Oligopolistic organization is not incompatible with some creative independence, in order to insure flexibility and innovation. In recording, like other oligopolistic media industries such as

film, television, and publishing, financial control is centralized but decision-

making is decentralized (Rothenbuhler and Streck, 1998).

Media and Communications

27

Digital Convergence?

Driving much of the transformation of media is the growing power and shrink-

ing size and cost of computing. Some foresee a universal medium that digitizes

all other media ± indeed, the totality of recorded human culture ± into a bound-

less ocean of zeroes and ones. The vaunted ``convergence'' of telephones, televisions, and computers is best seen not as a union of existing media but the

assimilation of all media by the computer. The Internet is both a new medium

and a zoo of diverse media species ± raising again the paradox of simultaneous

bigness and smallness in media today. Marshall McLuhan argued that the

content of a new medium is an old medium. The Internet contains all previous

media ± telegraphy, telephony, phonography, radio, television, film, books,

magazines, newspapers, and videogames ± and, alas, advertising. It offers an

interesting case of a still normatively unsettled medium of communication. On

the one hand, the Internet seems to be as free from social obligations as home

video viewing: anonymity and the lack of face-to-face acquaintance allow for

uninhibited venom and narcissism in expression. Yet the leading Internet service provider, America On Line, with its significant name and policing of indecent

material, may represent the revival of an older normative model. Indeed, in

many ways the Internet is recapitulating radio's early transition from a culture of anarchic, technically minded renegades (amateurs/nerds) into a corporate

engine of entertainment and commerce. The ongoing fight will concern access

and intellectual property.

The Internet is a huge well of digitized code ± sounds, texts, images ± available for creative appropriation, raising fascinating questions for art and economics.

One is the unprecedented manipulability of digital texts. Digital technology

allows for editing within the frame, instead of between frames, blurring the

formerly separate domains of production and post-production in film and video.

The documentary or testimonial function of photography or sound recording is

now more dubious, as they become less records of events than fabrications of art.

The dephysicalization of entertainment, information, and other forms of pro-

gramming also opens new problems in intellectual property, thanks to sampling

technologies, intensifying questions such as ``copyright of personality,'' which protects celebrities and their likeness, voice, or even gait from appropriation.

Dead celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and John F. Kennedy

have all been digitally resurrected in advertising and film. Monroe has even lent her voice to the London Underground's public address system (with a suitably

anglicized accent). Digitization allows the uncanny practice of harvesting fresh images, words, and sounds from the dead.

Like channel multiplication in television, digitization raises questions of the

public organization of cultural menus. What is to keep cultural consumption

from being identical to cultural production, as people learn to treat digitized

products as code to be manipulated? Again, the fear of private cocoons or

the utopia of universal creativity should be limited by both the recognition

of opportunity costs and the ongoing need for shared cultural experience.

28

John Durham Peters

Information is not scarce in a digital world, but intelligence is, one reason why search engine services are proliferating. The packaging (pre-processing) of

information is always crucial, especially in situations of programming abun-

dance. Information bottlenecks reinforce the principle that media are not just

pipes, but have unanticipated consequences. As Innis insisted, new media create

monopolies of knowledge and hence aid the formation of new power-holding

classes, such as the operators of Internet portals like Yahoo!

Digitization intensifies an old principle of electronic media: economies of

scale. In contrast to print media, which always had steep unit costs (paper and

ink), audiovisual media generally often faced gigantic first-copy costs and cheap unit costs. Even a feature-film print, costing over ten thousand dollars, is

inexpensive compared to the cost of the original; cutting a vinyl LP copy is

cheap. Whereas analogue media require a physical connection to the original,

digital media can be transported anywhere with enough bandwidth. Media

industries are today principally in the software business. The recording industry is considering ``digital kiosks'' where customers may choose an album, download

it, and have the CD burned on site, thus eliminating distribution and inventory, just as film distributors are developing digital projection to avoid the significant expense of transporting cans of 35 mm film. The etherealization of cultural

commodities also provokes worries: the record industry wants to assess fees,

similar to radio, for Internet airplay of music, instead of the Internet culture of unlicensed usage, an example illustrating some of the radical changes in distribution, ownership, and financing that digitization of content poses for large-

scale media production.

The dream of universal accessibility of culture, of an Alexandrine library on

the wires, is nowhere in sight. First, there are obvious impediments to access, in terms of access both to hardware and to competence or desire. (In the late 1990s, 70 percent of American homes did not have a modem.) Second, there are

technological problems of incompatibility and turnover. Texts written in the

1980s and stored on 51¤4 inch floppy disks are in some ways more irretrievable

than those written 700 years ago on medieval parchment. Vinyl LPs are all but

obsolete, and estimates vary on how long the current CD format will last. All

recording media are subject to degradation, but people have lots of experience

with writing and printing, whose (not inconsiderable) decoding apparatus is

literacy, but little experience with digital storage in an economy of planned

obsolescence. This age, eager to record everything, could ironically be a sealed book in the future if playback machines are not preserved. Digitization may

mean traffic jams as much as information flows. Massive data-dumping is the

flipside of gigantic downloading. As always, the sociology of digital media

should recognize the centripetal as well centrifugal trends.

The Great Communications Switch

Perhaps one of the strangest and subtlest of the social consequences of twentieth-century media is a change in interpersonal interaction. A chief feature of modern interpersonal life is its mediation ± by mail, phone, e-mail, and so on. At the

Media and Communications

29

same time, media discourse has grown increasingly conversational. In the 1940s,

Adorno attacked ``pseudo-individualization'' in mass culture, the pretense of

establishing one-on-one relationships with audiences in commercial forms of

address likèèspecially for you.'' At the same time, Merton attacked thè`pseudo-Gemeinschaft' of media-promoted communities. Both grasped, from distinct positions on the theoretical compass, the ways that media had assumed

interpersonal features and vice versa. Just as broadcasting and telephony have

switched media (from air to wires), perhaps the richer nations of the planet are in the middle of a great communications switch: in face-to-face talk intimates

broadcast at each other, while media are full of strangers chatting with us.

A hallmark of twentieth-century cinema, drama and literature ± and sociology

± is the gaps between people; that is, the distortion and difficulty of dialogue.

People are shown as sending messages to each other and never quite connecting.

Broadcasting and the press, in contrast, have consistently imitated dialogical and intimate styles of talk, a development motivated by both domestic reception and

commercial purpose (Scannell, 1991). Although some scholars have treated

``parasocial interaction'' (the sense that people can have personal relationships with media figures) as a pathology, it is clear that most relationships, face-to-face or otherwise, are mediated in some sense. There are elements of fictionalization in interpersonal relationships, not only in fan clubs or the more prototypical

kinds of parasocial interaction. Knowing what is dialogue and what broadcast in

daily interactions (i.e. what to take personally) is often difficult. E-mail's dis-embodiment of interaction represents a longer trend that theorists such as

Luhmann and Giddens associate with modernity generally. Harvey Sacks's con-

versational analysis showed just how tortured and fraught ± and intricately

ordered ± everyday dialogue could be. Interaction has become precisely some-

thing to be managed, not a natural reciprocity.

While everyday speech has grown more fraught, public discourse has grown

more personal. In the nineteenth century, it was considered undignified for

presidential candidates to make personal campaign appearances. Aloofness

was honorable. Today it is a truism that leaders must photograph well and

project their sincerity over television. From Teddy Roosevelt onward, the

personalization of political leaders has grown massively, thanks to developments in the audiovisual capacities of the press and a more general process of social

informalization, a process, once started, that did not stop with Reagan's smile

and Clinton's tears, but made public the former's polyps and the latter's semen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For ideas, conversation, and advice I would like to thank Judith Blau, Kenneth

Cmiel, Joy Hayes, Chul Heo, Elihu Katz, Franklin Miller, Stylianos Papathanas-

sopoulos, Eric Rothenbuhler, Michael SaÂenz, and Peter Simonson, without

implicating them in any errors of fact or interpretation I have made.

3

Modernity: One or Many?

Peter Wagner

Half way through the fourth volume of his monumental tetralogy on the past

two centuries of world history, historian Eric Hobsbawm unexpectedly uses an

extraordinary phrase when he characterizes the period from 1945 to 1990 as

``the greatest and most dramatic, rapid and universal social transformation in

human history'' (Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 288). Historians are usually quite reluct-

ant to come out with such grand propositions. That is one reason why the

assertion comes as a surprise.

The second reason for surprise is more strictly sociological. Even though

no extended period of world history is without some important changes, the

second half of the twentieth century could be considered one of unusual

stability. In global terms, the most significant institutional transformation was certainly decolonization. But if the focus is on Western societies, all that