Joshua Meyrowitz: No Sense of Place

Joshua Meyrowitz: No sense of place. The impact of electronic media on social behavior.

1. Behaviour in its place

Part 1: Media as change mechanism

2. Media and behaviour: a missing link

Media as cultural environments

> new environments, always more than the sum of its parts – thus more than just the old + the new.

Innis and McLuhan: lact the development of clear, linear arguments and evidence. Their findings are in an unusual form, not easily integrated.

A real attempt to link analysis of media characteristics with analysis of the structure and dynamics of everyday social interaction.

Situational rules: intersubjective, objective within the group.

> different roles for the different participant. The expected reality of the situation. The complex dynamics of encounters and the rules that govern them. We learn our culture’s stock of situational definitions. The relationship between the situation and behaviour.

Describes life with the metaphor of drama: role performances > ordinary and smooth flow of social life. This information is not naturally available but needs to be learnt.

Constantly mobilizing energies to create socially meaningful impressions. The performance.

Front region: the expected role

We gain sense of ourselves through relationships with other people. Our selves as personalities we become attached to.

In our understanding of the relationship between media and situations.

3. Media, situations and behaviour

Situationists traditionally: situations in terms of physical place. Meyrowitz: situations as patterns of information flow. The perceptual field and information access.

All that people are capable of knowing about the behaviour and actions of themselves and others.

A given pattern of access to social information.

> diminish the difference between live and mediated communication.

New media > restructure situations and require new sets of social performances.

Different behaviours require distinct situations – separation of situations allows for separation of behaviours.

Situations and their matching roles are not as stable as situationist have claimed. Boundaries of situations may break down.

Social reality as the patterns of situated behaviours. These patterns may be modified by individual life decisions, by chance; and the society’s media use.

Situations as also defined by those who are outside.

that divide situations from situations. Electronic media change the boundaries > new events and behaviours.

A need for a single primary definition for a situation. What happens when two situations merge? > new third situation and new behaviour patterns. New, synthesized definition.

We expect people to be situationally consistent. Consistency of treatment from others within a situation.

Interdependence between front- and back regions. But more than just front and back > continuous and variable model of the interplay of onstage and backstage.

> changes in patterns of social interaction.

The importance of consistent performances: we have to take into consideration what kind of information the audience has about our behaviour from other situations. The example of students performing as teachers.

may - divide existing social systems: individuals allowed to develop deeper back-stages and more forward on-stages.

4. Why roles change when media change

1.  Roles of affiliation or ‘being’ (group identity)

“Our experience – their experience”

Group identities always excluding.

How does new media alter who shares information with whom. Changes in social information systems > changes in group identity

Members of the same group tend to share the same backstage > team: distinguished by their perspective on the situation, and by the amount of information they have concerning the performance.

> rearrange group identities: offering new ways of revealing backstage behaviours.

Shared place > shared information systems/information access.

Socialisation closely related to information characteristics of group identity.

Examine the potential of new media for dividing people of different ages and backgrounds into different informational worlds.

Access to a group’s backstage behaviours.

May affect the extent to which group’s are able to control access to their backstage behaviours.

Traditionally a link between social passage and physical passage. Socialization as new access to the group’s territory and the information available there.

Reshape socialization roles by affecting the traditional relationship between physical location and access to social information.

Performed authority, one’s ability to gain the trust and willing obedience of others.

The control over the relevant knowledge, skill and experience. Close interrelation between social information and technical knowledge.

By merging informational worlds > egalitarian forms of interaction

Hierarchal roles depend on the shielding of the back-region. The appearance of ‘no act’. Knowledge must appear to be unknowable > mystification.

Hierarchies undermined if media expose what was once the private spheres of authorities.

Traditionally a link between degree of status and degree of control over territory.

Media that undermine the relations between physical isolation and social inaccessibility > lower high status roles.

Part II: From print situations to electronic situations

Technologies such as television, radio, telegraph, telephone, taper recorder, computer. But with main focus on television.

Media as types of social settings that include and exclude, unite and divide people.

1.  To what extent does the medium tend to divide or unite different types of people into different or similar informational worlds?

5. The merging of public spheres

Type of access and steps needed to achieve access varies greatly between types of media.

Shared-ness of social information: create separate information-systems or include different people in a common information-system

The skill of learning to encode and decode messages: for instance with alphabets: phonetic, syllabaries, logographics.

Writing systems as selective and exclusive in relation to spoken language. Society divided into distinct sets of information-systems on the basis of levels or reading ability.

Barely an access code at all. Meyrowitz is perhaps understating the knowledge codes involved with encoding audio-visual codes?

> highly selective diet of information through print.

Print: appropriate to our sense of self and group affiliations. But people will watch programmes on TV they are not particularly interested in.

With print: selective flow of information > specific social information system sections. People read about what they on beforehand are interested in.

As groups, socialization processes and ranks of authority by changing the patterns of information access established by print media.

Un-appropriate content. People getting access to information not intended for them. < problems inherent in a system that communicates everything to everybody. Formerly segregated information-systems are integrated.

When there is no longer a resource strain (there is room for specific TV-channels). Room for narrowness. Meyrowitz is sceptical and believes in the continuous integration of information-systems, at least sceptical to a return to the same segregated systems as those fostered by print.

Unlikely to divide the audience into clear categories of age, sex, religion and education. Obviously a point made by Meyrowitz that can be criticised today when media literacy is more important than ever.

There are different implications for social behaviour between:

Is likely to blur the distinctions in group identities, socialization stages and authority hierarchies. Television undermines behavioural distinctions.

6. The blurring of public and private behaviours

Three dichotomies:

Goffman.

Communication

Both communication and expressions.

Susanne Langer.

Mostly discursive

Both presentational and discursive information

Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson.

Digital information

Both analogue and digital information.

Because of the differences between print and electronic media, their messages tend to be about different things. Television deals with personal, private realm in the public arena. The separation between private and public is blurred as television necessarily reveals expressions; not only intended communication. Capturing personal attributes. Expressions as more ‘natural’ and real than words > how one tends to ‘know’ people from television.

> from formal and social front region messages to informal and personal back region messages. Electronic media tend to merge personal and public spheres.