Discuss some of the ways in which technologically mediated communication has helped to constitute the distinctive character of modern social life.

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                                                                                                                         Sarah Morgan

                                                                                                         MACM01 Core Module

Discuss some of the ways in which technologically mediated communication has helped to constitute the distinctive character of modern social life.

The media unquestionably contributes to the experience of modern social living. It is an agency which cannot be void from human existence as it plays a significant role in our development and contemporary day to day living. This produces two potential areas for exploration; the media world and the social world and looking at the various ways in which the two worlds meet, overlap and influence each other in the characterizing of modern social life. Media theorists however have the tendency to view the social world from a cause/effect angle, explaining the social world in terms of the influence that the media has upon it. It is perhaps commonplace to find in media studies literature various accounts and descriptions of encoding/decoding strategies founded by Hall (1973), uses and gratifications approaches defined by Blumler and Katz (1974, in Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch, 1974) and the potential influence of media language in communication (Matheson, 2005) which all work to highlight media influence upon society. While to some extent such direction is valid and produces useful theory regarding the media and social living, authors such as Silverstone (1999) call for the direct study of the social world and social theory itself to explain how the media helps to constitute the distinct character of modern social life. This largely looks at the work of social theorist Anthony Giddens and for a more media detailed explanation the work of John Thompson.

The importance of Giddens’ (1990; 1991) work in relation to characterizing the distinctiveness of modern social life is justified by his approach which binds together the micro and macro issues, for example, personal experiences and subjectivity alongside institutional changes in the social world, and their interconnectedness. This approach allows for the prospect of looking at the media in a broader social context and understanding the media in relation to other institutions and practices.

As previously mentioned, the media plays a significant contribution to society. It can provide information, an analysis/interpretation of news by journalists, promotion and entertainment with its goal of serving as a bridge between consumer and the world, connecting us to people, images, information/ideas and people (Whannel, 1998). McCombs (1994) writes that it is an agency so powerful that occasionally our total behaviour can be instantly and completely dictated by what we may see and hear and of which can sometimes have a priming effect on society (Jo and Berkowitz, 1994). But in the eyes of Garnham (2000) and social theorists such as Thompson (1995), to discover how the media, and specifically technologically mediated communications, have become constitutive of modernity it is important to look at the development of such communications, the liberty of the individual (Barbrook, 1995), how new technologies of communication have penetrated social life (McLuhan, 1960) and to chart how the media has aided in shaping the social world from a bottom-up perspective of the consumers rather than the institutions (Garnham, 2000). From early print communication to the more recent electronic forms of communication as Thompson (1995:3) states that:

“if we wish to understand the nature of modernity – that is, of the institutional characteristics of modern societies and the life conditions created by them – then we must give a central role to the development of communication media and their impact”.

It is most important in this instance to highlight the factors which have defined modernity. Giddens (1990) provides us here with one of the most notable descriptions. He suggests that that in pre-modern cultures, time and space were essentially linked through place and that modernity has involved a transformation of time and space and our individual experience of it. In the pre-modern world, he explains that day-to-day life was highly localized and there was a dependence on those in our immediate physical locality, yet this experience “was usually imprecise and variable”, but with the invention of the mechanical clock in the late 18th Century, which was “of key significance in the separation of time from space”, it allowed for the quantification of time and permitted the day to be designated into ‘zones’, for example, the working day (ibid., 1990:17). Despite the advent of the mechanical clock, Giddens (1990:18) states that time, space and place were still connected until “the mechanical clock as matched by uniformity in the social organisation of time”, a shift which was characterised in later modernity by the standardisation of the worldwide calendar. These processes which Giddens (1990:18) terms “the emptying of time”, by which time is seen as abstract and allows people across large areas to access mechanical time to plan their social lives, is “in large part the precondition for the “emptying of space””. “The development of “empty space”” Giddens (1990:18) argues, “may be understood in terms of the separation of space from place”. Where ‘place’ is conceptualised by physical locality and geographical situation (Giddens, 1984) and “spatial dimensions of social life are…in most respects, dominated by “presence” – by localised activities” (Giddens, 1990:18), space within the advent of modernity, alongside time, have been pulled away and abstracted from place, thus rendering relations to be “between “absent” others” and transactions which were usually characterised by face-to-face interactions to occur “locationally distant” from a given situation (ibid., 1990:18). Needless to say, Giddens (1990:19) is not arguing that place has disappeared, but has merely become “penetrated and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them”, that touch the physical locale and consequently alter the personal experience of being in a place of which the ultimate consequence of these local arrangements developing into global arrangements is the advent of globalization (Tomlinson, 1999; Giddens, 1999; Shome and Hegde, 2002).

Such transformations of time, space and place which Giddens (1990:21) identifies pave the way for his concept of disembedding which describes the “”lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” on a potentially global scale where subsequently many of our social relations with people and institutions occur at a distance and of which many are faceless. The concept of disembedding Giddens (1990:21) claims involves the “movement from small-scale systems to agrarian civilisations and then to modern societies” and distinguished in this are two types of disembedding mechanisms; symbolic tokens and expert systems, which feature “in the development of modern social institutions” (ibid., 1990:22). As one of the symbolic tokens, Giddens (1990) identifies money. Money, he details, “permits the exchange of anything for anything” and “provides for the enactment of transactions between agents widely separated in time and space” (ibid., 1990:22-24). Whereas in pre-modern societies money existed in physical form e.g. coins and notes, and still exists in those forms today for the purpose of local social interactions and transactions, there is an increasing occurrence of money taking the form of information, particularly for business purposes e.g. the stock exchange. Though such an example is usually identified with businesses and large organisations, for the lay individual in a modern society, money is increasingly experienced as ‘plastic money’ e.g. credit and debit cards, which can be used for local and global transactions. The second disembedding mechanism that Giddens (1990) identifies is the expert system which Freidson (1986, in Giddens, 1990:27) describes as “system of technical accomplishment of professional expertise that organise large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today” such as doctors or lawyers. Giddens (1990:28) labels such institutions as expert systems and characterises them as disembedding mechanisms because “they remove social relations from the immediacies of context” and similar to symbolic tokens provide “”guarantees” of expectations across distanciated time-space”.

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The next critical juncture of Giddens’ (1990) work follows on from the hypothesis of symbolic tokens and expert systems and draws upon their impact on modernity. Giddens (1990) identifies that symbolic tokens and expert systems are critical to the understanding of what he terms the ‘risk culture’ in modernity, similar to the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Cottle, 1998). He theorises that there is a trust/risk dynamic established in the conditions of modernity, one which involves carrying the basic trust developed in childhood throughout our lives which transfers into a sense of ontological security created by lives bound up by routine, ...

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