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desires. Also, affect and emotion can be consciously manipulated by means
of selective representations in advertising, zoos, magazines and other arenas.
Finally, to talk and write about the 'non-representational' is, necessarily, to
represent it(!). As per the previous point, this reveals the difficulty of moving
entirely 'beyond' or 'outside' representation as a social practice. (For a more
pointed critique of recent research focussing on the non-representational,
see Hemmings, 2005.)
First-hand experience versus second-hand representation?
Fourth, it's sometimes said of life in the early twenty-first-century 'knowl-
edge society' that it's increasingly 'mediated'. At base, this means that much
of our interaction with myriad others occurs via various physical media that
permit communication 'at a distance'. What's more, as I noted earlier, much
of this interaction is today dispersed because, with technologies like televi-
sions, radios, home computers, the Internet and mobile phones, those on
the receiving end of mediated communications are not obliged to come
together physically in order to access the information, knowledge or expe-
riences they seek. As I also said before, this applies as well to the epistemic
communities creating and disseminating this information, knowledge and
experience - they themselves are both localised
and
distanciated. This per-
mits much mediated communication to be
mass
communication. Millions
of otherwise different individuals, largely unknown to one another and geo-
graphically separated, are able to receive the
same
information, knowledge
or experience if they wish.
Three reasons why the mass media exist are fairly obvious. First, there's
a lot of money to be made influencing the tastes of myriad potential
consumers and users. Second, in democracies votes count, as does public
opinion. Third, distant events these days have material consequences for
our enduringly local lives. Unsurprisingly, a great deal of mediated mass
communication involves representation - a daily newspaper, be it a tabloid
or a broadsheet, is an obvious example of this (see
Chapter 7
for an in-depth
discussion of mass mediated news representations).
Notwithstanding its heightened importance compared with decades gone
by, mediated mass communication has not crowded out other, seemingly
different ways of interacting with people and the non-human world. Appar-
ently 'unmediated' encounters remain intensely important. For example,
think of one's daily face-to-face relations with one's parents, lovers, friends,
children or workmates. Think too of everyday, first-person activities like
walking to the bus stop, eating food, riding a bike to work or taking a hot
shower. For all of us, these activities seem different in kind from, say, watch-
ing an episode of
Inside nature's giants
- a British science documentary series,
shown on Channel 4, in which very large animals were dissected forensically.
We often attach great personal significance to these sorts of 'direct' encoun-
ters. For instance, it's one thing to read about British adventurer Bear Grylls
