Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 218

the “involvement of temporally/spatially distant influences with human
sensory experience” (Giddons, 1991: 243). Mediation thus bridges
time and space in communication, through modern communication
technologies and through the mass media. Media theorists such as Mey-
rowitz ( 1985 ) have elaborated on the decreased significance of physical
presence in the experiences of people, as electronic media have altered
the significance of both time and place for social interaction and com-
munication. Face-to-face presence is often no longer relevant in com-
munications through the mediated deterritorialisation of experiences.
But is experience the same as mediated experience? Tomlinson
( 1999 ) has questioned the neutrality of the medium in passing experi-
ences through space and time. The medium is not just a technological
mean that delivers experiences with high speed, effectively and eas-
ily. We should also question to what extent the medium intervenes in
the interaction and experience itself, when information is communi-
cated. In fact, the development of the modern media can be seen as
a constant attempt to diminish and minimise the intervention of the
medium in the communicated experience. Immediacy, in the sense of
dissolution of the medium itself, is of course never possible, and in that
sense there is a fundamental, qualitative difference between mediated
experience and direct face-to-face communication. Tomlinson follows
Thompson ( 1995 )indistinguishing three modes of interaction. Face-
to-face interaction has a dialogical form with a multiplicity of symbolic
cues made possible by a shared spatial and temporal reference system.
Second, mediated interaction (letters, telephone, fax, telegraph) is also
dialogical, but - by use of a technical medium - allows communication
between persons distant in place and/or time. But through that, it lacks
common references of copresence and has thus a more narrow range of
symbolic cues. Third, mediated quasi-interaction (the mass media) is
essentially a one-way (monological, thus quasi-) communication meant
for a range of recipients (rather than one). It is still interaction (and
not just one-way information transfer), as the recipients are active in
their interpretation and meaning construction. The first two categories
do not really deterritorialise experiences and interactions in ways that
disturbs local cultural and moral narratives, as they place experiences
in a meaningful wider context. The latter category of mediated expe-
rience potentially can and often does disturb local cultural and moral
narratives, as with the technological expanding capacity of the media,