I intend this book to be used by students who are taking media courses at
advanced undergraduate and taught postgraduate levels, either in the field of
media studies or else in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. My main aim in writing it has been to provide an accessible yet challenging guide to some ways of thinking about media and communications in modern life. From the start, though, I ought to declare that this is not straightforwardly a book about media theory, at least not in the conventional sense in which that term has come to be understood today. Rather, my title, Media/Theory, should be taken to indicate a commitment to connecting the analysis of media and communications with selected themes in contemporary social (and, to an extent, cultural) theory. These are themes of time and space, relationships, meanings and experiences. While this is primarily a book for students, I also hope, of course, that it will be read by lecturers and researchers who, like me, are teaching media courses in higher education. For a number of those people, my choice of themes and asso- ciated headings on the contents pages may appear at first sight to be unusual. As I will explain, my approach does not involve replicating the existing struc- tures that are employed within this genre of academic writing (although see Thompson 1995; and Silverstone 1999, for perhaps the closest relatives to the present book). A secondary aim, then, has been to make a distinctive contribu- tion towards our rethinking of the shape and direction of media studies, by suggesting a revised conceptual vocabulary and framework for inquiry. There is a cumulative narrative in what follows, so that we begin with core issues of time and space, of cyclicity and extensionality, enabling us to move on to inti- mately related matters of social interaction, signification and identity. Allowing for the regular incorporation of fresh material along the way, the books story builds from chapter to chapter. By deciding to organise things thematically in this manner, I am departing from previous, often highly productive, ways of telling. For example, in an introductory guide to cultural theory and popular culture, John Storey (2001) offers a clear and helpful tour of the isms (culturalism, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxisms, feminisms and postmodernism). Some of INTRODUCTION 1 these traditions of thought get a mention in my own discussion, alongside less obvious schools like phenomenology, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, yet they are not absolutely pivotal to the plot. Another approach for teaching in the humanities and social sciences is to focus on key thinkers (for instance, Stones 1998; Hubbard et al. 2004). Again, I believe that line of inquiry has considerable merit. It will soon become evident that several such theorists are identified in my commentary. The writings of sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, are cited at various points throughout, as is Paddy Scannells work on communications via broadcasting. However, on this occa- sion I have resisted the temptation to let individual academic authors, as opposed to key ideas and themes, give an overall order to the book. In media and cultural studies, probably the most common categories now used in writing and teaching about media are those of production, represen- tation and consumption. Indeed, my impression is that this has become the standard framework for introducing media theory to students in higher educa- tion. That conceptual division, or a version of it, is found in recent publications by Jostein Gripsrud (2002) and Kevin Williams (2003) amongst others. They deal with the three categories in different sequences, with Gripsrud electing to start with audiences or consumers, before ending with industries and producers, but their perspectives are broadly similar. A few years ago, I contributed to a university distance-learning course that adopted a circuit of culture model of roughly the same sort (Moores 1997), and so my sympathy for the industry/ text/audience framework is already on record. Still, I have decided not to employ it in this book as an overarching theoretical model. To be sure, there will be numerous occasions when practices of media production, representation and consumption get referred to in the pages ahead. My current view, though, is that there are certain limitations to the use of these categories (see also Moores 2004). While they are suitable for the study of what has been termed mass communications (radio, television, newspapers and so on), they cannot always be applied so successfully to particular forms of elec- tronically mediated communication conducted via telephone, including mobile phones, and the internet. These are media that we must surely now bring within the scope of media studies, forcing us to bridge what I would see as the unhelpful divide between work on mass and interpersonal communications or, for that matter, between discussions of so-called new media (Harries 2002; Flew 2005) and older, more established modes of technologically mediated communication. In live telephone and computer-mediated dialogue, there will be performers and audiences of a kind, but rather than the institutionalised gap between production and consumption found in broadcasting or print jour- nalism, the positions of the participants are constantly shifting as they typically do in physically co-present, face-to-face communication. It might even be appropriate for us to conceptualise radio and television as involving a sort of social interaction with listeners and viewers, as explored in the latter part of this book. I NTRODUCTI ON 2 Just two further, general points ought to be made at this preliminary stage, before I proceed to open up the particular themes that will give a distinctive structure to the book. The first has to do with the definition of our field of interest. In my experience, a common misconception, certainly among students setting out on their degrees, is the belief that media studies are simply about studying media in isolation. They are not, or, at least, I want to argue very strongly that they should not be. Instead, it is necessary to appreciate the complex ways in which media of communication are bound up with wider insti- tutional, technological and political processes in the modern world, from the reproduction of social life on an everyday basis to the reorganisation of social relations on a global scale. For that reason, many topics apparently unconnected with media are discussed in the book, from home decoration practices to the interpersonal rituals of strangers in a city street to patterns of transnational migration and resettlement. Above all, then, my conviction is that media have to be understood in their broad social and cultural contexts. Partly as a conse- quence of that need for contextualisation, doing media studies can mean coming to terms with ideas drawn from a formidable range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (for instance, from history, geography, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychology and sociology). Far from being the easy option at university, as some ill-informed critics have suggested, the analysis of media and communications is, in actual fact, often a highly demanding activity for students, precisely because of its interdisciplinary character. The other general point I wish to make here is concerned with the link between theory and research. Anybody who knows my own previous work (see, for example, Moores 1993; 1996; 2000) may be surprised to discover that this is a theory book, since in the past I have always insisted on the importance of empirical investigation. However, if the present book represents something of a change of emphasis for me, it is not the result of any fundamental change of heart. I remain firmly committed to the empirical, as well as the theoretical, dimension of media inquiry. Indeed, there are many references in the coming chapters to the findings of research projects, either because they serve to illustrate conceptual issues or else because they give rise to specific ideas and concepts. Theory requires a level of abstraction, of course, yet it is best regarded as inter- twined with ongoing empirical research on contemporary social existence. Having spent a while explaining what this book is not, let me now start to discuss, in a more positive vein, the key themes I have chosen, so as to prepare the reader a little for the story that unfolds in the chapters to follow. I begin with time and space. Writing back in the 1970s, Giddens (1979: 202) notes that neither time nor space have been incorporated into the centre of social theory. The principal reason, he suggests, was a problematic tendency to treat the temporal and the spatial as external environments within which social life is conducted, as the special concerns of historians, geographers or philosophers. Attempting to counter this earlier tendency, he argues that timespace rela- tions should be seen as an in-built and fundamental feature of social I NTRODUCTI ON 3 interaction. They are, in his view, integral to the organisation of human societies rather than backgrounds to them, and therefore deserve to be at the very core of our thinking about the conduct of social life (see also Giddens 1981). Today, by the 2000s, time and space have become absolutely central themes for social theorists, while divisions between academic disciplines in the humani- ties and social sciences are increasingly blurred, and I believe that these themes should be at the core of our efforts to theorise the role of media in modern societies. Of course, it is not my intention to imply here that Giddens is somehow single-handedly responsible for such a major shift in thinking, but his own writings do contain valuable insights into timespace relations, which will be considered over the coming pages. Other social theorists cited in the first part of the book include Barbara Adam, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Doreen Massey and John Urry. Although the focus of their attention is not on media, all of them have interesting things to say about communication tech- nologies and practices. In addition, I will refer to several authors whose work does concentrate more fully on media, time and space, like Scannell, whose name I have already mentioned in this introduction, Marshall McLuhan (an influence on Giddens), Joshua Meyrowitz, Kay Richardson and Ulrike Meinhof, and Roger Silverstone. Drawing on a range of material, then, I am proposing that we need to understand media as operating in the wider temporal and spatial arrangements of society, but also as contributing, reciprocally, to the creation, maintenance or transformation of social time and space. Chapters 1 and 2, on cyclicity and extensionality respectively, both deal with this two-way connection, yet each has a specific emphasis. Expressing it as simply as possible, one is mainly about round-and-round movements in time-space, while the other has to do with what might be called a reaching out, and a collapsing in, of social life in the contemporary period. As well as explaining such movements and metaphors, these two opening chapters raise a number of issues to be pursued in the second part of the book, which is concerned with human relationships, meanings and experiences in circumstances of technologically mediated communication. If, as Giddens (1979: 3) puts it, we must grasp the timespace relations inherent in the constitution of all social interaction, then logically the next step, after asking about matters of media, time and space, is to consider ques- tions of media and interaction. Chapter 3 does this, exploring at length, without completely exhausting, the theme of changing social relationships with others in the modern era. An important element of this change is the social deployment of communications technology, which helps to establish interac- tions and interaction mixes of a novel sort, involving mediated intimacies and sociabilities. Some of the writings I review there do start to address practices of meaning construction in peoples relationships (both face-to-face and medi- ated), but it is only in Chapter 4 that we turn to look in detail at theories of signification. In the field of cultural studies, in particular, the making of mean- ings and value distinctions has been a central theme, and so my commentary on I NTRODUCTI ON 4 media and signification will offer an overview of conceptual developments that are mostly associated with this academic area. What becomes clear in the course of the discussion is that I favour those approaches to signification in which meanings are seen to be socially variable, context-specific and multi-dimensional. Following that commentary, my focus shifts to issues of self and collective iden- tity in Chapter 5, where I place an emphasis on the theme of experiences that are distinctive to contemporary living. Any attempt to comprehend patterns of social interaction and signification calls, ultimately, for our close attention to the formations of modern subjectivity and community. Once again, though, my preference for certain theoretical perspectives will be evident, and in discussing media and identity I favour the notion of a reflexive or performative self, remaining suspicious of the wholesale decentring of the subject found in struc- turalist and poststructuralist thinking, which tends to dismiss the category of human experience far too easily. Among the theorists cited in the second part of the book are Roland Barthes (known primarily as a poststructuralist, although his late work on photography marks a radical departure from this school of thought), Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Arlie Hochschild and Valentin Volosinov. The three chapters in that part will also include references to authors like Stuart Hall, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, John Thompson and Sherry Turkle, whose publications include useful reflections on the dynamics of electronically mediated communication. Whilst I am not, in every case, wholly sympathetic to their ideas, all of the academics listed here provide highly relevant concepts for students of media and communications. I NTRODUCTI ON 5