In James Carey’s Communication as Culture (1989) he
presents a new way of thinking about communication. Carey challenges
established perspectives, where communication is viewed merely as transmission of
information, and promotes studying communication from a cultural perspective. He
draws upon the work of previous scholars (Clifford Geertz , John Dewey, Max
Weber, Walter Lippmann, etc.) to apply a cultural studies methodology to the
study of communication. Carey seeks to “demonstrate how media of communication
are not merely instruments of will and purpose but definite forms of life:
organisms, so to say, that reproduce in miniature the contradictions in our
thought, action, and social relations.” (9)
Carey
suggests two ways of viewing communication. The transmission view (the more common
of the two) uses terms like “imparting”, “sending”, and “transmitting” to convey
one party giving information to another. It involves “the transmission of
signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control.” (15) This view
connotes the desire for control and power as it is derived from the spread of
Europeans in their global colonization, and although technology and science
have separated communication from transportation, some of the residual implications
remain.
Carey
opposes this with the ritual view, which uses terms like “sharing”, “participation”,
and “association”. This view is “directed not toward the extension of messages
in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of
imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.” (18) Like the
transmission view, the ritual view has grown away from its religious origins
but still retains some of its metaphoric roots. There is an intellectual aversion
to this view because of the unfortunate assumption that science somehow
operates in a vacuum whereas culture is full of human error. Thus any method
that studies the activity of people within a culture must be flawed. So for
example, a transmission view of a newspaper would see it as a medium for
disseminating disinformation to exert control over a population; a ritual view
would see reading the newspaper as a shared experience by people in which their
worldviews are collectively shaped and confirmed.
Particularly
in America, communication studies (both mass and interpersonal) “have aimed at
stating the precise psychological and sociological conditions under which
attitudes are changed, formed, or reinforced and behavior stabilized or
redirected.” (44) American studies of communication have not given serious
consideration to the relation of forms of expression (art, religion, etc.) and
social order—how do meaningful symbols, and symbolic acts, affect real change?
Cary
suggests conceiving of communications as a cultural science as that will constitute
a more “human” model and deal with experience as it normally is encountered.
Culture is complex web of meaning which humanity has created, and “we are
challenged to grasp the meanings people build into their words and behavior and
to make these meanings, these claims about life and experience, explicit and
articulate so that we might fairly judge them.” (59) People exist simultaneously
in many different sub-cultures and a cultural approach to communication studies
offers us helpful insights that traditional (transmission) views do not. “Culture”
and “Communication” are not neatly delineated, finite artifacts or practices. A
ritual view allows for a more nuanced understanding of human societies where
the complexities of culture (and the influential, dynamic activities and forms
of communication) are accounted for. Carey desires to “press forward with a
form of cultural studies that does not perforce reduce culture to ideology,
social conflict to class conflict, consent to compliance, action to
reproduction, or communication to coercion.” (109)
The
second half of Carey’s book explores more specific facets of technology and
culture. He wants to debunk the rhetoric of an electronic utopia. “Electronics
is neither the arrival of apocalypse nor the dispensation of grace. Technology
is technology; it is a means for communication and transportation over space,
and nothing more.” (140)[1]
Carey offers a brief history of communication studies in North America and
traces the relation between time and space from local to global. He also traces
the history of the notion of “future” as it has been used to propel us along with
false promises of newer, better forms of human communication and the
eradication social issues altogether. Carey concludes with a detailed look at
the oft-neglected technological importance of the telegraph, the advent of
which marked the first time in history that information and transportation were
separated. Most of the attention Carey’s Communication
as Culture has received has been paid to its first half. The ideas he lays
out, although fairly simple, are a radical break from the way communication has
traditionally been studied.
[1] It is
perhaps here that Carey’s ideas seem somewhat dated; he was clearly writing in
a pre-internet era.
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