Channels and Media-tion |
ABSTRACT There are about a dozen media that are analyzed in Communication Studies. Some observations: Media are mediated. Mediator/senders are "collective communicators." Mediated/receivers are not passive audiences. "Mediation" (media-signification) requires distributed cognition. Though a medium can be separated from mediators and mediated in the experiential vacuum of abstract ideas, in a communication situation it functions only as a channel through which a text passes (granting that the construction of the text is constrained by the medium). Communication is a generative matrix in which each part can be understood only in its relation to the other parts in the matrix. |
media in Communication Studies.
A medium is defined as "a means or instrumentality for storing or communicating information" (Wordnet). In models of mass communication, a medium is a channel that delivers messages from senders to receivers. Media is the collective noun for all the medium typically employed in mass communication:
- books
- magazines
- newspapers
- telegraph
- telephone
- radio
- records
- film
- home video
- television
- telecommunication
- the Internet
These are "delivery systems" which constrain the messages, texts, or images they transmit.
It is impossible to study any media without considering the communication matrix. A matrix is an environment in which something is created. A communication matrix is the situation—in all its inter-related aspects—that envelopes the communication. All communication is situated and governed by its situation.
Mediated communication seems unlike conversation because of its spatial and temporal dimensions. Senders & receivers are at a distance from each other. The moment of composition and the moment of reception may also be quite distant from each other. Thus, it would not seem that mediated communication can be considered a "matrix." Yet, rhetoricians and narratologists argue that readers have a strong sense of implied authors and authors have a strong sense of implied readers.
In mediated communication, senders and receivers are often differently situated. A TV producer co-ordinates the efforts of his team in a studio whose aim is to make a profit. The TV produced reaches audiences who are mostly in their homes aiming to relax and be entertained. At either end of the communication circuit a communication matrix is formed. That the implied authors audiences infer do not match the actual authors in the studio, or that the implied audiences that authors imagine do not correspond to the actual audiences on their couches does not prohibit a communication matrix. At one end, the producers form a matrix even though their audience is imagined. At the other, the members of the audience form individual matrices even though largely unaware of the actual producers and commune with the personae on their screens.
It is not an accident that Waite's study of mass media from which I borrowed the term under discussion is entitled, Mediation and the Communication Matrix. Waite is concerned with the ways that media alter persons experience of the world and others. Not surprisingly, the virtuality of mediated experiences is central to her argument.
Mediator/senders are "collective communicators" and mediated/receivers are a "collective audience."
The senders of mediated communications such as a TV commercial constitute a collective. They "cooperate" with each other toward a common end, however fractious their negotiations may be. Such collectives, from the perspective of cognitive psychology, have a "distributed cognition." In 1987 E. Hutchins gave a paper at a workshop on contact, cognition, and activity in Stenugsund, Sweden, entitled "Learning to navigate in context." In it he argued that cognition is shared among several agents who cooperate with each other for a common purpose. Hutchins studied the operation of a large US Navy ship navigated by seven people. In his analysis, the course they plotted was planned in advance and each person performs parts of the plan. The plan is, in effect, a shared mental model. Thus the agency required to navigate was distributed among the seven members of the crew. (Keith Oatley, "Distributed Cognition," The Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology, 102ff.)
Mutual planning is a common and widespread social phenomenon. Hutchin's navigation example is analogous to a collective that plans and executes a TV commercial. In this sense, the senders in mediated communication are collective communicators with distributed cognition.
The receivers of mediated communications are less organized but constitute a "collective," meaning that they can be considered as a group albeit only statistically. First, they all watch the same program. Second, they can be described demographically. Third, they can be related to the addressee of the show.
Receivers (actual persons who watch the show) possessing all of these characteristics constitute a collective audience
Mediated/receivers are NOT passive audiences.
In discussions of computer mediated communication, its effects on an audience are considered to be either passive or interactive, depending upon whether the audience can "send" feedback to the initiating senders. However, when considering the receiving end of a communication as a matrix, audiences are never passive. They are constantly modifying their mental models in response to the communication they are receiving. Modifying a mental model of the world does not necessarily imply that beliefs are changing. In many if not most instances of audience participation in mediated events, receivers are modifying their mental model of the world being presented to them. This can, however, result in correlative modifications of their view of the actual world.
In a section of her book, Mediation and the Communication Matrix, entitled "The Communication Matrix and the Social Domain," C Kaha Waite writes:
The connection between the communication matrix and the social domain can best be explained by considering the shift in the figure-ground [relation]. When an emerging communication technology shifts the figure-ground in a way that privileges new forms of experience—such as the shift from the fixed space of the printed page to the kinesthetic motion of the screen—and when that shift in the figure-ground is widely shared through a community, it will inevitably influence community life.
I stand in some fundamental relationship to the lived world as I also stand in some relationship to a community of others who share and support my awareness of that world. (105)
Later in the section, she adds that "People organize their experiences in terms of space and time" in relation to a "perceptual horizon" (107).
Her point is easily illustrated. The experience of email is not the same as the experience of mail because the space/time ratios are quite different. For emailers, mail becomes "snail mail." Similarly the experience of a web-cam conversation is not the same as the experience of a conversation or an instant message or a text message. Different aspects of the experience are foregrounded and backgrounded. In a text message, the text is foregrounded. In a web-cam conversation, the image of the person in the conversation is foregrounded and, depending on the software, your image (which you ordinarily do not see while conversing) is backgrounded with respect to the size of the images on the screen. Our experience and social relations are modified by such experiences. If you are enthusiastic about web-cam conversations, your sense of friends who refuse to buy a web-cam is altered by attitude—such a refusal may portray your friend in a new light where he appears to be a luddite.
"Mediation" (media-signification) requires distributed cognition.
Distributed cognition governed by a mutual plan does not necessarily imply signification. However, if the result is a mediated communication, signification is entailed.
Construing mediation as media-signification, all of the acts of composing that we associate with single authors of articles and books—combining words and phrases, deleting, amplifying, revising, criticizing—pertain, but are distributed. The cognitive abilities of several persons are forged by a over-riding plan into a text.
Though a medium can be separated from mediators and mediated in the experiential vacuum of abstract ideas, in a communication situation it functions only as a channel through which a text passes (granting that the construction of the text is constrained by it).
As Umberto Eco points out, often something that is an instrument can by a metanomic turn of mind be called by the same term as its result. His point concerned calling a code-system a code when it is simply the taxonomic table of signs that are used in coding (A Theory of Semiotics, 38). In this case, the medium is called the message. We have Marshall McCluhan to thank for this metonymy.
In his chapter on "The Medium is the Message," Marshall McLuhan glosses this phase in the following way:
... in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 23.)
This phrase underscores the connection between the instrument and its user, e.g., "Clothing: Our Extended Skin" (114ff.).
C. Kaha Waite in her Mediation and the Communication Matrix writes "McLuhan argues that the content of media ... distracts the viewer or reader from understanding how the specific medium alters one's experience of the world" (11). With this in mind, she adds: "Less attention could be paid to what is written in the newspaper or spoken on television, and more attention paid to the way each medium shapes the message" (12). Following the insights of Merleau-Ponty, Waite is concerned mostly with the impact of the media on the senses. (See "Mediated/Receivers Are Not Passive Audiences" above.) She is concerned with cognitive abilities such as perception.
For Waite, communication is a generative matrix in which each part can be understood only in its relation to the other parts in the matrix. In her view, to isolate one element of a communication situation and consider it as if it were a "stand alone" fact, so to speak, is misleading. It would be equivalent to trying to understand the taste of a chocolate cake by tasting flour. The ingredients of a cake have to be understood in relation to each other and in a temporal sequence of the activity of making a cake. The concept of a communication matrix brings this point of view into communication studies.
jjs
Notes:
. The term, "addressee," is commonly used in semiotic texts. It is usually a synonym of "receiver." Here, it is used in parallel with Gerald Prince's term, "narratee"—"the one who is narrated to as inscribed in the text." For example, the addressee of the sentence, "Spry is a fantastic addition," is a person familiar with Dreamweaver CS3. "The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring Ajax to the web design community who can benefit from Ajax, but are not well served by other frameworks" (Adobe Lab). Adobe just added Spry to Dreamweaver. ... 
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last revised:
September 4, 2007
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