The mediation of experience

Virtually all human experience is mediated -- through socialisation and in particular the acquisition of language. Language and memory are intrinsically connected, both on the level of individual recall and that of the institutionalisation of collective experience. ⁸ For human life, language is the prime and original means of time-space distanciation, elevating human activity beyond the immediacy of the experience of animals. ⁹ Language, as Lévi-Strauss says, is a time machine, which permits the reenactment of social practices across the generations, while also making possible the differentiation of past, present and future. ¹⁰ The spoken word is a medium, a trace, whose evanescence in time and space is compatible with the preservation of meaning across time-space distances because of human mastery of language's structural charcteristics. Orality and tradition are inevitably

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related closely to one another. As Walter Ong puts it in his study of speaking and writing, oral cultures `have a heavy investment in the past, which registers in their highly conservative institutions and in their verbal performances and poetic processes, which are formulaic, relatively invariable, calculated to preserve the hard-won knowledge garnered out of past experience which, since there is no writing to record it, would otherwise slip away'. ¹¹

Although Lévi-Strauss and others have skilfully explored the relation between writing and the emergence of `hot', dynamic social systems, only Innis and, following him, McLuhan, have theorised the impact of media on social development in a sophisticated fashion, especially in relation to the emergence of modernity. <sup>12</sup> Both authors emphasise the connections between dominant kinds of media and time-space transformations. The degree to which a medium serves to alter time-space relations does not depend primarily on the content or the `messages' it carries, but on its form and reproducibility. Innis points out, for example, that the introduction of papyrus as a medium for the inscribing of writing greatly extended the scope of administrative systems because it was so much easier to transport, store and reproduce than previously used materials.

Modernity is inseparable from its `own' media: the printed text and, subsequently, the electronic signal. The development and expansion of modern institutions were directly bound up with the tremendous increase in the mediation of experience which these communication forms brought in their train. When books were produced by hand, readership was sequential: the book had to pass from one person to another. The books and texts of pre-modern civilisations remained substantially geared to the transmission of tradition, and were almost always essentially `classical' in character. Printed materials cross space as easily as time because they can be distributed to many readers more or less simultaneously. ¹³ Only half a century after the appearance of Gutenberg's bible, hundreds of printing shops had sprung up in cities all over Europe. Today the printed word remains at the core of modernity and its global networks. Practically every known language of humankind has been set down in print, and even in those societies where levels of literacy are low, printed materials and the ability to produce and interpret them are

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indispensable means of administrative and social coordination. It has been calculated that, on a global level, the amount of printed materials produced has doubled every fifteen years since the days of Gutenberg. ¹⁴

Printing was one of the main influences upon the rise of the early modern state, and other antecedent institutions of modernity, but when we look to the origins of high modernity it is the increasingly intertwined development of mass printed media and electronic communication that is important. The emergence of mass circulation printed materials is customarily thought of as belonging to an era prior to that of electronic messages -- particularly by McLuhan, who radically set off one against the other. In terms of sheer temporal succession, it is true that the prime example of mass printed material -- the newspaper -- came into being about a century before the advent of television. Yet it is quite misleading to see one merely as a phase prior to the emergence of the other; from early on electronic communication has been vital to the development of mass printed media. Although the invention of the telegraph came some while after the first flourishing of dailies and periodicals, it was fundamental to what we now know as the newspaper and indeed to the very concept of `news' itself. Telephone and radio communication further expanded this connection.

The early newspapers (and a whole diversity of other magazines and periodicals) played a major role in completing the separation of space from place, but this process only became a global phenomenon because of the integration of printed and electronic media. This is easily demonstrated by reference to the development of the modern newspaper. Thus Susan Brooker-Gross has examined changes in the time-space `reach' of newspapers. She found that typical news items in an American paper from the mid-nineteenth century, before the diffusion of the telegraph, differed both from those of the early 1800s, and from those produced subsequently. The news items reported stories from cities some way distant in the US, but these did not have the immediacy the reader is used to with the newspapers of today. ¹⁵

Prior to the coming of the telegraph, Brooker-Gross showed, news stories described events that were close at hand and recent; the further away a particular happening, the more it would appear at a very late date. News from afar came in the form of

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what she calls `geographic bundling'. Materials from Europe, for example, literally came in packages from the ship, and would be presented in the form in which they were found: `a ship arrived from London, and here is the news it brought.' In other words, channels of communication, and the pressures of time-space differences, directly shaped the presentation of the printed news-pages. Following the introduction of the telegraph, and then the telephone and other electronic media, it was the event that increasingly became the determining factor governing inclusion -- rather than the place in which it occurred. Most news media preserve a sense of `privileged place' in respect of their own position -- giving a bias towards local news -- but only against the backcloth of the pre-eminence of the event. ¹⁶

The visual images which television, films and videos present no doubt create textures of mediated experience which are unavailable through the printed word. Yet, like newspapers, magazines, periodicals and printed materials of other sorts, these media are as much an expression of the disembedding, globalising tendencies of modernity as they are the instruments of such tendencies. As modalities of reorganising time and space, the similarities between printed and electronic media are more important than their differences in the constituting of modern institutions. This is so in respect of two basic features of mediated experience in conditions of modernity. One is the collage effect. Once the event has become more or less completely dominant over location, media presentation takes the form of the juxtaposition of stories and items which share nothing in common other than that they are `timely' and consequential. The newspaper page and the television programme guide are equally significant examples of the collage effect. Does this effect mark the disappearance of narratives and even perhaps the severence of signs from their referents, as some have suggested? <sup>17</sup> Surely not. A collage is by definition not a narrative; but the coexistence of different items in mass media does not represent a chaotic jumble of signs. Rather, the separate `stories' which are displayed alongside one another express orderings of consequentiality typical of a transformed time-space environment from which the hold of place has largely evaporated. They do not, of course, add up to a single narrative, but they depend on, and also in some ways express, unities of thought and consciousness.

Characteristic of mediated experience in modern times is a

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second major feature: the intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness, which is in some substantial part organised in terms of awareness of them. Many of the events reported on the news, for instance, might be experienced by the individual as external and remote; but many equally enter routinely into everyday activity. Familiarity generated by mediated experience might perhaps quite often produce feelings of `reality inversion': the real object and event, when encountered, seem to have a less concrete existence than their media representation. Moreover many experiences that might be rare in day-to-day life (such as direct contact with death and the dying) are encountered routinely in media representations; confrontation with the real phenomena themselves is psychologically problematic. I shall expand on this phenomenon later in the book. In conditions of modernity, in sum, the media do not mirror realities but in some part form them; but this does not mean that we should draw the conclusion that the media have created an autonomous realm of `hyperreality' where the sign or image is everything.

It has become commonplace to claim that modernity fragments, dissociates. Some have even presumed that such fragmentation marks the emergence of a novel phase of social development beyond modernity -- a postmodern era. Yet the unifying features of modern institutions are just as central to modernity -- especially in the phase of high modernity -- as the disaggregating ones. The `emptying' of time and space set in motion processes that established a single `world' where none existed previously. In the majority of pre-modern cultures, including those of medieval Europe, time and space merged with domains of the gods and spirits as well as with the `privileging of place'. <sup>18</sup> Taken overall, the many diverse modes of culture and consciousness characteristic of pre-modern `world systems' formed a genuinely fragmented array of human social communities. By contrast, late modernity produces a situation in which humankind in some respects becomes a `we', facing problems and opportunities where there are no `others'.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 859