Terje Rasmussen - Social Theory and Communication Technology

Once, the electro-magnetic telegraph was the first and only technology to transfer, store and retrieve words in extended space. Today, the telegraph is a dying technology. It dies, however, in a world saturated by digital tele-graphy. It turned out that the telegraph was only a token of what the philosopher J.F. Lyotard calls a telegraphable culture. Over the last two decades in particular, the marriage of telecommunications and computers into digital communication technologies such as the Internet has achieved growing impact on day-to-day practices as well as on society as a hole. Communication technologies are among the most typical products of post-war industrialism, both because of their astonishing ability to process information and communication, and for their reach beyond economic production. They shape and change relationships of everyday life and social institutions, from which they also receive their social meanings. As everyday practices are gradually geared into these new channels of articulation, new forms of interaction emerge and others transform. It is my intention to investigate these new forms, this telegraphable culture. This collection of essays addresses theoretical contributions and insights which may assist us in the understanding of modern society inhabited by a wide range of new media.

Until the mid 1980s, telecommunications were largely ignored as an object in sociology and media research. Social and cultural problems of telecommunications were largely left unaddressed. Apparently, the problems of telecommunications seemed to be merely technical, economic and (increasingly) policy-oriented. Several reasons may account for this. First the field of media research was structured around theories and models dedicated to the particular structural features of one-way mass media and mass communication. The social and cultural impacts of telecommunications were impossible to grasp with models that assumed mass audiences and mass distributed messages. There was an implicit tendency to view telecommunications as devoid of any cultural or political meaning, content-less as they were. The structure of the media made it irrelevant to distinguish between powerful senders and dominated receivers of messages. No legislation was oriented towards the content of telecommunications the principle of universal service obligation differed from public service in that it referred only to geographic and social distribution. The sociological theme of ideology as power rendered irrelevant. Neither media studies nor cultural studies could find any cultural content to analyse. In the distinction between interpersonal communication and mass communication, the telephone and other communication technologies simply disappeared.

Second, the most widely distributed and used telecommunications medium, the telephone, appeared invisible in everyday life. The discrete and mundane success of the telephone may also explain some of the lack of concern in both sociology and media research for telecommunications. One particular reason for this lack of interest may be that the telephone has had a feminine image, deriving from its explicitly domestic context. The telephone enhanced the widening gaps between private and public spheres of industrial society, and simultaneously provided means for female interaction. As a domestic medium, it was naturalised as a feminine medium, available for homeworking women with the expressive and integrating duties of the family in relation to relatives, other family members, friends, etc.

Over the last two decades, however, many of the distinctions between mass media and telecommunications have gradually blurred. Convergence takes place at several levels. This is due to technical, economic and social changes in both kinds of media:

First, digital telecommunications adopt prestructured content with narrative meaning, such as on web-sites. Emerging trends indicate that telecommunications extend their area from the strictly personal and interpersonal to the mass level. This results in three kinds of changes: in use patterns, technology and policy. The telephone and the fax are used for distribution of standardised messages, as in marketing and fund-raising. Junk-calls and junk-fax and junk-E-mail clearly approaches the principle of mass communication. In professional life, the trend to substitute answering machines for live human voices is evident. Voice mail, voice processing devices and message services make it harder to reach a human being on the telephone. Instead, a standardised, preproduced message is presented. A similar trend can be seen in the increasing use of Video-on-demand, World Wide Web and other databases and services as public information devices.

While the traditional culture industry is not involved to the same extent in telecommunications, the software, computer games and marketing industry expands more than most all other industries. It seems that the information technology industry headed by Microsoft Inc. develops a culture industry of its own. The telecommunications and cable industry co-operates with content providers like the movie industry, because of the possibilities to transmit live images in the ordinary telecommunications networks. The increasing affiliation to software and television means that communication technologies acquire a cultural content.

Second, and related is the trend of telephone conferences (Telemarkets, chat-lines, etc.), video conferences, and computer conferencing to depersonalise telecommunication (Dutton, 1992: 386). More indirectly, electronic surveillance in public spaces and databases containing personal data also suggest that telecommunications to a greater extent have collective significance in that they involve the mass. Telecommunications prove to enhance group or mass meaning because they increasingly operate in conjunction with mass media. In distance learning for instance, electronic media is normally combined with printed media.