A Specter Is Haunting the Global Village
How do media make our day-to-day experiences global? How do we experience the global through media? One method of investigating globalization is through the theory of media ecology. What is media ecology? Media ecology looks at media and how media structure our experiences, our perceptions, and especially our sense of space and time – and different media do this differently. We cannot find out what media are up to by looking at their content. Media ecology looks at media as environments; the idea here is that media are not only carriers of messages or neutral conduits that merely transport information but rather media set up environments that humans then adapt to, negotiate or even counteract.
A point that I would like to make as background is that face-to-face communication – with its continuous feedback and co-presence between people, its utilization of all the senses in interaction and the fact that the roles of sender and receiver are equally shared – is the fundamental human communication situation. What is essential to face-to-face communication is the difficulty or even impossibility of not communicating. Whether we are bored, excited, exasperated or overjoyed when interacting is almost secondary to the more elemental state of involvement in face-to-face communication. When humans are face-to-face it is impossible to not communicate and therefore to be in someway responsible in the act of communication - even if the level of responsibility is a mere response. One way to think of this responsibility is the manner in which face-to-face communication contains fundamentally the possibility to respond. When all of the conditions listed above are present it is nearly impossible to control the process of communication. Mass media is a different story. I am not saying that face-to-face communication is more transparent, more honest or even more authentic. However we must recognize the fact that face-to-face communication is the mode we are most accustomed to, the modality that allows for a fundamental attunement between humans. There is a radical difference between the involvement experienced in face-to-face communication and the type of involvement permitted through mass media.
That having been said what I would like to do is explore what happens when global news i.e. the stories and images of distant nations, people, and events, becomes interwoven through the medium of television into our “local” everyday experiences. Connected to this question is the question of what happens when our experience is no longer confined to specific physical location; no longer confined to the local communities we find ourselves in. To live in a globalized society means we are no longer rooted in a specific time and place and therefore constricted to only local experiences of the world. When we plug into global communication networks, such as television, we escape the constraints of place for the dizzying spaces of globalized experience.
Now we could say that globalization is experienced directly because globalization involves increased physical mobility i.e. traveling is an important cultural aspect of globalization. However, I think it is safe to assume that for most Americans the impact of globalization is felt not by world traveling but by staying at home and using media. Globalization is not for the most part the physical act of traveling to distant places but rather traveling to distant places by talking on the telephone, surfing the web or especially watching television and specifically watching the news.
How do we experience distant events through the medium of television itself and a genre like the news? What is the meaning of this experience? This question comes into focus when we think about the fact that these distant events are just that– “distant events” and their proximity, their “closeness”, is strictly through televisual images. How does television bring us closer together; or to use Marshall McLuhan’s term what does it mean to live in a global village? There is a way that television collapses physical and cultural distance and provides us with a sense of involvement with distant lives and events. But what is the nature of that involvement?
On one level the act of watching distant events on television is obviously not the same as literally being present at those events. No amount of news reporting, on say the war in Iraq, can give us the sense of what it is like to actually be there. That having been said I might suggest here a skepticism about McLuhan’s claims of television and other electronic media constituting a global village. There are major differences between the type of face-to-face collectivism of village or community life and the vicarious or virtual togetherness of televisual experience.
First I am suggesting that there are limits to what television can do in involving us in the life of others because of television’s sensory limitations. The highly visual nature of television is both its strong point and its weakness. This visual quality is really a limiting or curtailing of the other senses which we routinely use in face-to-face interaction. The visuality of television can lead to dissociation as much as it can lead to involvement. Also the fact that the vastness of the world has been reduced to the size of a 20 inch television screen lends to a diminishing of our sensory involvement with these events and therefore to an overall decrease in involvement.
Along with diminishing our sensory involvement, television news in the United States reduces the seriousness and gravity of events by continually interrupting any news story with commercials. As viewers we know that no matter how disastrous or tragic any piece of news may be, it will be punctuated by a series of advertisements. The seriousness of the news story is contradicted by the lightheartedness of the ads. Furthermore these ads show a world close at hand, they represent our world, which is filled with attractive young people consuming the latest in automobiles, cell phones and tooth paste. This ad world is much more preferable to the chaotic world portrayed in the news; an alien “other” world outside the borders of our commercials. It is interesting to note that the only time in recent history that this flow of advertising was disrupted, shut down so to speak, was during the tragic events of 9/11, when major networks stopped running commercials during their reporting of 9/11. On some level, during the events of 9/11, commercial television, for a few days, realized the moral inappropriateness of punctuating images of tragedy with images of happiness.
The American viewer of a television news program, with stories and images of war, civil unrest, and disasters sits in the comfort of his or her living room. There is a sense in which the viewer is connecting to a far off place through the images playing out on the TV screen but also there is a sense in which the viewer is cut off from the violence, pain, messiness of what is going on in front of the cameras. Television in effect distances the viewer in a psychological or emotional way from the events being televised through the very images he is watching. Although television can involve us in very powerful ways by collapsing physical distance, we cannot ignore the possibility of the opposite occurring: that to watch these images of remote parts of the world inhibits the experiencing of closeness and produces a detachment and distance in the viewer. The televisual experience of far-away places only takes place in a mediated realm which is clearly denoted as remote from our own local spaces. The medium of television and the genre of news may act as a kind of barrier which while informing us also protects and insulates us and our communities from the troubling chaos of distant places. Remember also that the experience of watching television is a domestic activity; it takes place within the intimacy and privacy of our living rooms. This domestic context of television watching is at extreme odds with the global images television presents. We tend to think of the home as a physical and psychological sanctuary. In western culture the notion of home signifies a shelter from the anxieties and troubles of the outside world. Once we turn on television and watch a newscast we have allowed all sorts of troubling public realities into the privacy of our homes. We are left with a paradoxical situation; being better informed implies that our homes will be penetrated by distressing images that disturb the very qualities that we value in creating a “home”. The notion of home encompasses not only a physical “shelter” but also an emotional and psychological boundary.
The concept and experience of home, and the related experience of privacy, becomes meaningless as global media turn the home inside out making its borders permeable to all kinds of public disorder. Our sense of security that we derive from feelings of being at home is diminished as we lose control over who and what can enter our home. This ability to allow and not allow people and things into our home is fundamental to our sense of security and privacy. Television, with its barrage of images of global disorder, represents a loss of personal security and cultural certainty in the place where we expect it the most. The experience and comfort of having the world out there, outside our homes, is lost as we experience this opening up of the home to all aspects of the world through television; the expanding of cultural horizons through globalized media turns out to be a very ambiguous and troubling condition.
Furthermore television’s mediated proximity to distant events can be experienced as a form of surveillance more than an act communication. By surveillance I mean a detached observing and monitoring of other people’s behavior and action to gain a sense of control. Although we have little real control over distant events, there is, I would suggest, the feeling of control as the people, out there, far away are close as images of observation, as objects of surveillance, but at they same time remain infinitely remote and therefore incapable of acting directly on us or our world. Watching the news of global events creates feelings that the messy world out there has been normalized, that is controlled through its transformation into news or information. As long as we “know” about these distant events there is a feeling of control through this knowing, a kind of stabilization of the most catastrophic events through their being positioned as news. As long as the news as a mode of surveillance, delivers into our living rooms images of a dangerous world “over there” and “far away” we know that we are safe here. The chaos of the world out there has been managed by the very act of being caught within our globalized media network. In addition this disorder has been contained by being reduced to the confines of the pure surface of the televisual image. On some level television viewers know there is little that cannot be normalized and therefore managed by being transformed into a television image.
Moreover the very setting of a news broadcast establishes the impression of surveillance and control; the banks of television monitors behind the newscaster connotes a technological system that watches at all times all areas of the world. The graphics and maps that appear magically on cue and the orderly progression from story to story suggests a chaotic world has been made tidy by the very imposition of television’s system of surveillance. I think there is much to be concerned about regarding the experiential distance that is maintained between the viewer of television news and the events viewed. On the one hand the news transports events, at the touch of a switch, into the intimate spaces of the home and in this sense are close to us. On the other hand they remain for the most part detached from the practical contexts of our everyday life. For the most part we feel that the events we watch do not impinge directly on our own lives.
Furthermore we are unable to directly “intervene” in the distant events we see, in the same way that we can intervene in the lives of those close to us and even in the life of our local communities. The events that we experience at a distance are not at hand or within reach like local or even national events and are not readily amenable to the action of viewers. Unlike our experiences of face-to-face communication which is two-way, i.e. dialogical, television is one way. Its messages like all mass media flow in one direction with no possibility of direct intervening response from the viewers. I am not saying that viewers are passive or couch potatoes, what I am saying is that the structure of television is such that there is little room for direct response. Thus being routinely presented with information and images about events which are remote from our own local everyday life and over which we have no control or possibility of real tangible intervention means we can experience ourselves as powerless. In addition how could we in any real sense be practically involved in the enormous number of events that are readily available to us through television news. How as an audience are we to respond to the presentation of extreme violence, mayhem and death for example in the coverage of the war in Iraq or Bosnia? It becomes difficult to incorporate this into our everyday experience. I am not denying the fact that people do find ways to achieve various levels of involvement with these events that are brought to us via television, however I think it is crucial to acknowledge that what we have here in part is a dilemma rooted in our new globally mediated relation to the world and how it has been radically transformed by the very nature of television and other global media. Here I am veering dangerously close to the idea of televisual experience as a moral detachment and even a moral pessimism.
