Media, Technology & Culture 02: Communication Technologies

The terms media and communications are often offered as a couplet, or even used interchangeably. But communication is a broad idea with a very long history, and the arrival of media technologies are usually seen to make possible a special form of communication, in which physical co-presence was unnecessary. The printing press, for example, is often argued to have made nations, democracies and bureaucratic states possible, allowing for the widespread dissemination of printed matter as books, newspapers, laws and scientific literature. For the first time, populations who might never meet face-to-face could share culture and knowledge. In this episode, via a discussion of James Carey’s essay ‘The Telegraph and Technology’ alongside other work, we explore how electronic media technologies such as the telegraph transformed the idea of communication itself, separating it from physical transportation. The telegraph, and the technologies that followed in its wake, allowed messages to communicate near-instantaneously. In so doing, they radically altered our experiences of time, space, distance and locality. But communication technologies are not without geography: they are always embedded in and help to produce material times and spaces.

Thinkers discussed: Doreen Massey and David Harvey (briefly); Harold Innis (The Bias of Communication); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy); S.D. Noam Cook (The Gutenberg Myth); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Jonathan Sterne (Thinking with James Carey); David Morley (Communications and Mobility); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form).