Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 219

news coverage of distant events on television becomes one-dimensional
visualisations and as such seems to shrink.
It is here that much of the criticism of television comes together.
Television does not succeed in closing cultural and moral distance and
thus does not manage to get us sensory-'involved' or engaged in dis-
tance practices and events. It is the medium of television that inhibits
the closing of distance, and rather works towards alienation, cutting
us off from distant events and insulating us from cultural encoun-
ters, because the TV screen reduces all experiences to the same one-
dimensional visual qualities. It is via these lines that Bauman ( 1992 )
criticizes the failed materialization of McLuhman's global village, get-
ting again very close to a polarization between a celebration of direct
experience and condemning mass-mediated interaction. Others have
less polarized assessments. Following Castells ( 1996 ), Young ( 1990 )
and Massey ( 1994 ), Tomlinson ( 1999 ) stresses that this qualitative
distinction should not be interpreted as a pure, transparent, simple
and morally superior form of face-to-face communicative interaction
versus a shortfalling, indirect, symbolized and mediatized interaction.
Similar to the idea that there is no superiority of small-scale political
communities over large-scale mass societies, there is also no inherent
preference of face-to-face versus faceless interaction. Or, as Castells
( 1996 : 373) puts it: “In a sense, all reality is virtually perceived”.
Tomlinson ( 1999 ) gives two principal reasons for the poor record
of television in closing moral distance. First, the intrinsic nature of the
medium, the monological character of mass media, means that engage-
ments with mass-mediated events are different from other media. These
events are not within the reach of the recipients. Our inability to inter-
vene in the experiences and events many miles away, which are remote
from our daily lifeworld and over which we have no control, means
that we experience ourselves as being insulated from them. Second, one
has to recognize that telemediated experience is situated in a total flow
of everyday lived experiences. A vastly growing number of experiences,
claims and moral demands comes together with the deterritorialisation
of experiences especially via - but not only - the mass media. The 'per-
ceived relevance structure' of experiences (Thompson, 1995 ) concep-
tualises that individuals make selections and priorities within the flow
of information and experiences. So the nonengagement of telemediated
experiences cannot just be blamed on the features of television or mass