Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

by James W. Carey

These essays encompass much more than a critique of an academic discipline. Carey's lively thought, lucid style, and profound scholarship propel the reader through a wide and varied intellectual landscape, particularly as these issues have affected Modern American thought. As entertaining as it is enlightening, Communication as Culture is certain to become a classic in its field.

Genres: Communication, Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Journalism, Academic

241 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[aa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book consists of 8 essays where the author theorizes different forms of communication. He seems set on dispelling both “the satanic and angelic images that have surrounded, justifies, and denigrated the media of communication.” In the first half he responds to and deconstructs condemnations of mass media, in the second half he critiques techno-optimism. Throughout the book, he highlights the significance that new forms of communication have to consciousness and culture.

Building on the ideas of John Dewey, Corey lays out two ways mass communication is viewed in Western thought: the transmission and ritual modes. The former is the dominant communication form in industrial cultures. Its goal is to speed up the process whereby information is given over wide swathes of space. He ties this project to both the imperialist need for the metropole to give orders to or request information from the colonies, and the corporate need for managers to control employees far away. So, its goal is control. Until the invention of the telegraph, “communication” was defined as both transportation and what we’d think of now. The latter could not happen without the former, so they were conceptually the same. Carey writes that the transmission view is inspired by religion, in that communication is a way for God’s servants to spread his message throughout space by conversion.

The “ritual view” is much older. From this vantage point, communication is a way of cementing ties and associations. Rather than project a message in space, it maintains a culture through time. Communications through this view are meant to create a meaningful cultural world which acts as container for human action. So, a weekly religious service would be an example. I think anarchist media often fits this view too. Book reviews, essays, music, and podcasts are somewhat meant to keep the tradition alive and maybe to orient those new to anarchism with its conceptual foundation of seeing the world. Or to put it less nicely, to orient people to our ideology.

I wonder what Carey thinks of ideology in this dichotomy. It seems to fit both ritual and transmission views. Is the ritual view meant to glue people who are already together only? Does converting people to a culture or ideology count as ritual, or is that when it becomes transmission? Either way, this concept resonates with me. I regularly notice a lack of cultural foundation when interacting with people that don’t share my anarchist ideas and practices.

Carey argues that the transmission theory is more dominant in the US because there’s a lack of national culture. He thinks we avoid a sense of culture due to individualism, a puritan suspicion of anything unproductive, and a fetishization of science which alleges to impart culture-free truth. Culture in the US is seen as a source of errors.

In the second part of this chapter, Carey claims that reality itself is formed by language. He defines communication as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.” As Jason Rodgers put it, words are magick. Carey explains this with an analogy of a map. A map is an imperfect attempt to represent the world’s geography. It inherently abstracts, simplifies, and smoothens the world’s terrain to make it easily representable to the map viewer. Yet it doesn’t just represent, it also directs whoever uses it. The map viewer navigates space in the real world based on looking at the map.

Language works similarly. When we use a word to refer to some thing or process, we are in fact excluding other parts of the world. “To define is to limit.” Words allegedly represent carved-out, simplified, and abstracted parts of the world through which we can try and make sense of it. It is through language that we conceive the world in order to navigate it. And like the map, language not only tries to represent the real world, it shapes our experience in it. Words then, can be a potent weapon for power and ideology, as well as subversion.

In the second and third chapters, Carey critiques scholarly views of mass communication dominant in the postwar era. Rather than study how people relate to media, scholars were interested in how media provided a glue for society and distracted us from our problems. He gets these two ideas from cultural theorist Clifford Geertz’s attempt to explain ideology. In the first, ideology could allegedly be predicted by structural forces like class. That explanation never correlated well. Working class people weren’t all anti-capitalists, and rich people weren’t all republicans. When that “causal” explanation failed, shifts were made by scholars to a “formal” one rooted in psychoanalysis. This view says that some people are maladapted to society, and ideology gives them answers to explain their maladaptation. Their anger, sadness, frustration, ennui, or general woes are directed at someone or something, which causes catharsis and relieving of tension. Thus, ideology heals society by burning off the neurotic energy of those who fall through its cracks.

Mass media critiques in the US, Carey argues, operate with a similar binary. Either media is viewed through its effects and uses for social control, or it’s viewed as escapism from our troubles. Carey thinks that one problem with this is the “mass” in mass communication. By implying the audience is a mass, you lose any individual relation one may have with media. All you can really argue about a “mass” is whether media corrupts or influences them generally. This gets in the way of studying specific forms and relations. Instead, he wants communications studies to catalogue the various meanings that people have with in communications and media. This is important because, as he points out in the first chapter, communication is a way of forming reality, not just representing it.

I felt like he was talking about me in this chapter. I have often dwelled on the effects of watching TV, playing video games, and using social media. I have written critical essays about them, in part because I traced some of my own suffering to when I spent significant amounts of time with them. I’ve tried to demonstrate how consuming media tends to reinforce capitalism. One of the arguments I used was that film and TV present the world as it is, and therefore hammer in this world’s feeling of inevitability. But is this true? What about science fiction? I presented video games as mere escapism: a means to deploy ones’ problem-solving skills and imitate a sense of accomplishment while really doing nothing.

At this point, I think there’s still something to these ideas, but ultimately my issue with consuming media now is how much time it takes away from making a break from this society. Since we have so much entertainment at our fingertips, nobody is ever forced to be bored and thus imaginative.

Carey continues this line of thinking in the fourth chapter but adds an interesting critique of the “effects” view of media. Utilitarianism’s argument is that we have individual desires and we try to act in ways which fulfill them and maximize utility, pleasure, and happiness. Social scientists allegedly don’t like Utilitarianism because it ignores social structure and power. So, instead of viewing individuals through it, social scientists project it onto all of society. Suddenly, society itself has desires and drives, and everything within it is effect, cause, utility, attitude, drive, or gratification of that drive. I read this critique as a “gotcha” moment to the social scientists of the “effects tradition”, since he doesn’t go anywhere with it afterwards. But whatever his intent, he doesn’t want to cast off the “effects tradition” entirely. He just wants to frame it as one way of thinking about the world among others and for Communications scholars to find and study them.

While these critiques of the culture industry make it appear that he’s opposed to critical theory, in the second half of the book he makes powerful links between communication technologies and social control. In chapter 5 he references Leo Marx’s concept of “The Machine in the Garden” to describe a specifically American hype for technological innovation that’s existed since at least the 19th century. The logic goes that in the early 19th century, the United States represented a break from Old World turmoil, injustice, poverty, and class struggle. Because there was so much “unblemished nature” to colonize, America could bring machines to it and live in an Edenic harmonious blending of machine and nature. Carey writes that this enthusiasm for technology was tarnished by America’s bloody Civil War, Reconstruction’s defeat, the cities turned into slums, class and racial warfare, the landscape polluted by mining, and the clearing of the forests. But rather than think critically about the impact of technology, the optimism was saved via a split between mechanical and electrical technology. Mechanical tech was blamed for technological problems, while electricity was heralded as its redeemer. This dynamic, where hope is placed in future technologies to repair damages brought by the old, is visible everywhere today.

“Chapter 6: Space, Time, and Communications” is a tribute to interdisciplinary scholar Harold Innis. Carey briefly summarizes for context the history of communications study in the US which Innis worked within. During the Cold War, communications studies and other social sciences were enlisted to help the U.S. develop techniques of war and social control. Academics were less critical or independent and became instead appendages for the U.S. imperial machine. Communications studies thus started looking for tools to put into action, rather than simply understand and represent the communication process. For example, one “behavioral” branch used animal psychology to model human behavior as governed by conditioning rather than mind and rational action. This led to studying how language, symbols, and media are most effective in enacting social control.

Using geography, history, economics, and political science, Innis resisted the Cold War subsumption of Communications studies within social psychology and physical science models. According to Innis, technology in the United States developed through a dialectic of decentralization and recentralization. After the War of 1812, attempts were made to bind the United States together through communications/transportation technology. New York became the country’s central city because of its ability to move information and goods quickly through the Hudson River and Erie Canal. This led to undercutting local and regional cultures. The national culture that began developing was the culture of New York City. This dynamic played out in political and economic dynamics as well. Hinterlands’ influenced diminished for the sake of central power. The more communications technology developed, the more people could be part of or subject to large organizations without the need for local structures to mediate for them.

The centralization/decentralization dialectic can be seen with printing. First it brought centralization by standardizing various vernaculars and prompting the creation of an education system which taught literacy of the one national language. Decentralization soon followed, since regional administrators or companies could eventually communicate using print as the price dropped. Soon, companies began using it more easily direct, monitor, and control their agents operating far away.

Innis believed that changes in communications technology also altered what people thought about, the things thought with, and the area in which thought developed. As communications technology developed, other elements of culture shifted to be concerned with space, rather than time. He argues that the First Amendment to the Constitution was meant not for freedom’s sake, but to shape conceptions of time as a “one-day world” where specialized knowledge could be imparted from the center to the periphery.

Innis pit the newspaper with the oral tradition. He uses Plato’s points in Phaedrus to bolster two arguments. First, that reading alone is a shallow way of coming to inscribe knowledge in the mind. Dialogue and asking questions are needed to work out the contours of ideas. Thus, modern education as a tool of social control tends to focus more on literacy than dialogue. Second, that this contributes to a reliance on experts, like the situation we find ourselves in now. Oral communication, on the other hand, cannot easily be monopolized.

This reminded me of optimism about social media. The argument goes that social media is participatory, and therefore can be a tool of liberation. If TV is about the center sending messages to passive viewers, then wouldn’t social media be a subversive response?

I think what’s happening here is the decentralization and recentralization process elaborated earlier. The internet and social media were both initially heralded as participatory, but then centralized power caught up. Elites used marketing, bots, and other technologies and services to more effectively send their messages through social media networks. This is supposedly how Trump won the 2016 election. The NSA and Facebook are developing better tools to effectively monitor them. Regardless of if Facebook was invented by the CIA or not, centralized power caught up in a dynamic that will continue ad infinitum.

In chapter 7, “The History of the Future,” Carey and John J. Quirk outline previous concepts of “the future,” and link them to contemporary notions. They say that human obsession with the future was embodied in the ancient Greek oracles. They are like scientists in that both claim special knowledge of the future, which grants them authority. Scientists just do so with knowledge gathered in closed systems, with which the public infers grandiose wisdom through the assistance of a culture that worships expertise.

And, Goodreads cut off the rest of my review...

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay compilation, and Carey himself, more than deserve canonical status in communication/media studies worlds. While over two decades old, Carey's impassioned plea for communication studies to move away from empirical studies emphasizing cause and effect relationships between media and society, and toward a more nuanced attempt to look at communication as a set of practices which work to bind societies and cultures together still rings true. Granted, cultural approaches to the study of media and technology have gained some ground in recent decades, but nothing like the British Cultural Studies movements or the sociological looks at cultures that Carey provides as models for emulation. While some of his work seems dated (his essay on the telegraph errs dangerously toward technological determinism and his appreciation of Innis is clearly one made prior to our digital revolution), most of his conclusions are as relevant today as they were in 1987. His attempt to bring ritual back into the study of communication and the overall idea that culture is comprised of communicative processes are important ones, and while they may require some modification in order to be useful to the contemporary scholar, they more than deserve to be read and considered in the form Carey originally presented them here.

[Titus Hjelm]

The first part is the interesting one. There Carey outlines his cultural studies approach to communication--which, admittedly, sounds less revolutionary a) than in 1988, b) for Europeans in general. The case studies in the second part have suffered even more in the last twenty years and would need to be complemented with an analysis of the post-internet world. But it's a valuable and thought-provoking book still.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential readings for scholars of communication, media, and technology & society. Many of Carey's insights about communication and technology, particularly his critique of the "rhetoric of the electrical sublime," ring more true and relevant today than when this was published. Provides a great gloss of the work of John Dewey and Harold Innis. Only drawback is that Carey too often conflates the relevant cultural unit with national cultural.

[Saint Android · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look into the ritual and transmission views of technology and how these ideas were ingrained in the American intellectual tradition.

[mahatmanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

ini buku kumpulan esai yang keren,
saya suka karena nyambung dengan marshall mcluhan [pujaan saya hihi...].
bagaimana media mengubah baik isi mau cara kita berkomunikasi.
suatu hal yang dekat dengan arsitektur, yang bisa disebut sebagai media juga. arsitektur mengubah jalannya kegiatan yang berlangsung di dalamnya, maupun citra visual yang dibangkitkan darinya. arsitektur bukan melulu wadah.
ntar,
baru baca preface [yang juga ditulis bagus oleh stuart adam] dan introduction.
stuart adam mendudukkan pemikiran carey ini dalam kontinuitasnya dengan macluhan dan innis. demikian pula memberi konteks masing-masing esai yang dihimpun dalam buku ini sehingga dengan demikian amat membantu saya menempatkan pemikiran carey dalam keseluruhan sejarah pemikiran media.
itu dulu deh...

[Inggita · Rating 3 out of 5]

basic reading for media anthropology majors. how would he negotiate Web 2.0 now after his Huxleyan observation in his essay as a tribute to Harold Innis: "Given a network of such monopolies backed by corporate economic and political power, we reach a stage under the impulse of advanced communication at which there is simultaneously advancing knowledge and declining knowing. We keep waiting to be informed, to be educated, but lose the capacity to produce knowledge for ourselves in decentralized communities of understanding."

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection of media essays. Very helpful for communication scholars.