The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (7 page)

becoming a spectacle, à`dreamscape of visual consumption,'' according to

Zukin (1992, p. 221). She shows how property developers have constructed

these new landscapes of power, stage sets within which consumption can take

place, including especially wining and dining (see Bell and Valentine, 1997, on

how ``we are where we eat''). These dreamscapes pose significant problems for

people's identity, which have historically been founded on place, on where

people come from or have moved to. Yet postmodern landscapes are all about

place, such as Main Street in EuroDisney, World Fairs or Covent Garden in

London. But these are simulated places for consumption. They are barely places

that people any longer come from, or live in, or which provide much of a sense of social identity. Somewhat similarly, Sennett (1991) argues that in the contemporary city different buildings no longer exercise a moral function ± the most

significant new spaces are those based around consumption and tourism. Such

spaces are specifically designed to wall off the differences between diverse social groups and to separate the inner life of people from their public activities.

14

John Urry

Objects are thus very significant in this construction of place. Various kinds of objects, activities, or media images may constitute the basis of such an `ìmagined presence.'' They carry that imagined presence across the members of a local

community, although much of the time members of such a place may not be

conscious of this imagined community. Various objects can function in this way

± and not just the immense monuments of place and community. Oldenburg has

described the significance of informal casual meeting places: bars, cafeÂs, com-

munity centers, spaces under pear trees, and so on. He calls thesè`third places,''

places beyond work and households where communities come into being and

neighborhood life can be sustained (Oldenburg, 1989; Diken, 1998).

Finally, even those places which are based upon geographical propinquity

depend upon diverse mobilities. There are countless ways of reaffirming a

sense of dwelling through movement within a community's boundaries, such

as walking along well worn paths. But any such community is also intercon-

nected to many other places through diverse kinds of travel. Raymond Williams

in Border Country (1988) is ``fascinated by the networks men and women set up,

the trails and territorial structures they make as they move across a region, and the ways these interact or interfere with each other'' (Pinkney, 1991, p. 49;

Cresswell, 1997, p. 373). Massey similarly argues that the identity of a place is derived in large part from its interchanges with other places that may be

stimulating and progressive. Sometimes, though, such notions depend upon

gender-unequal relationships to the possibilities of travel. Massey discusses

how ``mum'' can function as the symbolic center to whom ``prodigal sons'' return when the going elsewhere gets tough (1994, p. 180).

Finally, I shall consider two examples where research has shown how places

are constituted through networks of movement. First, among British road pro-

testors and travelers, dwellings are often impermanent and characterized,

according to one participant, by ``their shared air of impermanence, of being

ready to move on . . . re-locate to other universities, mountain-tops, ghettos,

factories, safe houses, abandoned farms'' (Mckay, 1996, p. 8). There is a sense

of movement, of continuous acts of transgression, as happens in the case of a

peace convoy. Their dwelling spaces are constituted through various routeways

and specific sacred nodes. Dwelling is intense, impermanent, and mobile. These

cultures of resistance are constituted as `à network . . . of independent collectives and communities' (Albion Free State Manifesto, 1974; see Mckay, 1996, p. 11).

Such groupings form à`loose network of loose networks,'' such as those

involved in free festivals, rural fairs, alternative music, hunt sabotage, road

protests, new age traveling, rave culture, poll tax protest, peace convoys, animal rights, and so on (Mckay, 1996, p. 11). These networks are reinforced by various patterns of travel, in which there is a kind of resistant mapping of key events, places, routeways, and so on (see Urry, 2000, on corporeal mobility).

Second, the literature on diasporas shows how cultures have been made and

remade as a consequence of the flows of peoples, objects, and images backwards

and forwards across borders (Bhabha, 1990). Gilroy specifically argues that: `Ìn opposition to . . . ethnically absolute approaches, I want to develop the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of The Sociology of Space and Place

15

analysis . . . and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective'' (Gilroy, 1993, p. 15). Diasporic societies cannot persist without

much corporeal, imaginative, and increasingly virtual travel both to that home-

land and to other sites of the diaspora (Kaplan, 1996, pp. 134±6). Clifford

(1997, p. 247) summarizes:

dispersed peoples, once separated from homelands by vast oceans and political

barriers, increasingly find themselves in border relations with the old country

thanks to a to-and-fro made possible by modern technologies of transport, com-

munication, and labor migration. Airplanes, telephones, tape cassettes, camcor-

ders, and mobile job markets reduce distances and facilitate two-way traffic, legal and illegal, between the world's places.

The sacred places and the family and community members to be visited are

located in various ``societies'' linked through ``structured travel circuits'' (Clifford, 1997, p. 253). Such modes of travel and exchange ± what Clifford terms

thè`lateral axes of diaspora'' ± reorganize the very sense of what is a social

group's ``heritage,'' which is never simply fixed, stable, natural, and `àuthentic''

(Clifford, 1997, p. 269). In particular, the close-knit family, kin, clan, and ethnic connections within a diaspora enable the flows of migrants and income across

national borders and the more general organization of diasporic trade.

The tendency for diasporas to live within major ``global'' cities means that

they particularly contribute to, and profit from, the increasingly cosmopolitan

character of such places (Hannerz, 1996). This can be seen with the overseas

Chinese who have generated Chinatowns in many major cities across the globe.

The largest is in New York and is a strikingly recent phenomenon. In the 1960s

there were only 15,000 residents but over the next twenty years they had grown

twenty-fold, with a staggering array of services, workshops, and increasingly

professional trades. Chinatowns have of course become key nodes within the

routeways of ``global tourism,'' since they sell authentic `èthnic quaintness,'' a quaintness cleaned up and repackaged for the international tourist gaze (Cohen,

1997, p. 93).

Diasporas thus indicate the more general point about place, summarized by

bell hooks (1991, p. 148) when she writes: ``home is no longer one place. It is

locations'' ± and, we might add, the mobilities between such locations. I have

described sociology's journey to make sense of such places, a journey that

involves traveling in and out of diverse intellectual homes, producing a hybrid

analysis drawn from many locations.

2

Media and Communications

John Durham Peters

Communication and Social Theory: Legacy and

Definitions

Of all the social sciences, sociology has the most distinguished record of con-

tributions to the study of media and communications. Throughout every decade

of the twentieth century, important sociologists made them a central topic ±

Tarde, Park, Blumer, Ogburn, Lazarsfeld, Merton, Katz, Adorno, Habermas,

Tuchman, Schudson, Gans, Luhmann, Bourdieu, among many others. Yet com-

munication is not simply a specialty in sociology; it is in many ways the historical precondition of modern social theory. Its founding thinkers, such as Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and ToÈnnies, rarely called communication by

name, yet their picture of modern society, with its individualism, participatory institutions, and new possibilities of large-scale social conflict, administration, and integration, centers on the symbolic coordination of individuals and populations. Concepts as diverse as Marx's class consciousness, Durkheim's collective

representations, or ToÈnnies's Gesellschaft all point to social relationships that transcend the face-to-face. Neither ancient nor feudal society had any use for a notion of pluralistic, inclusive, and horizontal sociability. Modernity, with its political and transportation revolutions, foregrounds the symbolic aspect of

social coordination. Communication becomes an axis of modern society. Asso-

ciation not anchored in place or in personal acquaintance is the central topic of both modern social theory and mass communication theory. Classic European

social theory in this sense was always the study of communication without

knowing it.

It was the Americans who made the explicit connection between sociology

and communication. Drawing on German political economy and the evolution-

ary philosophy of Herbert Spencer, such first-generation American evolutionary

Media and Communications

17

sociologists as Lester Frank Ward and Franklin Giddings saw the movement of

goods and ideas as the lifeblood of modern society. Even more emphatically,

Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Ezra Park, and W. I. Thomas, along with their

philosophical co-conspirators John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, saw

society as a network of symbolic interactions. Communication was the secret

of modern social organization. In Dewey's famous declaration, ``Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may be fairly said

to exist in transmission, in communication.''

In its intellectual development, ``communication'' has meant many things

(Peters, 1999), and this was no less true in sociology. Communication's sense

could include the dissemination of symbols, cultural transmission, and also more intimate processes, such as dialogue, socialization, or community creation. For

the Chicagoans, communication could mean the descriptive total of human

relationships as well as an ideal of democratic participation. American demo-

cracy, they thought, depended on citizens becoming co-authors in the symbolic

and material shaping of their worlds. Park and Burgess (1921, p. 341) offer a

characteristic pair of sentences: ``the limits of society are coterminous with the limits of interaction, that is, of the participation of persons in the life of society.

One way of measuring the wholesome or the normal life of a person is by the

sheer external fact of his membership in the social groups of the community in

which his lot is cast.'' A straightforward descriptive statement (that communication defines social order) is followed by a normative one (that participation is the criterion of healthy social relations). This normative loading of communication

persists in social theory to this day. For JuÈrgen Habermas, for instance, communication is not just linguistic exchange or social interaction, but a principle of rational intersubjectivity, even of social justice. For him, communication is much more than the sharing of information; it is the foundation of democratic deliberation. In seeing communication as the mesh of ego and alter, he is a clear heir to the early Chicago sociologists. ``Communication'' has always worn a halo,

offering inklings of the good society.

Communication as a concept also splits along symbolic and material lines. In

E. A. Ross's classic definition, ``Communication embraces all symbols of experi-

ence together with the means by which they are swung across gulfs of space or

time.'' Communications, in contrast to communication, often makes just this

distinction, referring to the institutions and practices of recording and transmitting symbols rather than to an ideal of community. It typically includes tele-

communications, such as the postal service, telegraph, telephone, satellite, and computer networks; sometimes railroads, highways, air and sea travel; sometimes also fundamental modes of human intercourse such as gesture, speech,

writing, and printing.

We can also speak of these institutions and practices as media. The term has

several senses. First, and least interesting, media in popular usage refers indiscriminately and often disparagingly to the personnel or institutions of the news media, taken as a lump. Second, mass media often refer to a complex of culture

industries, especially the big five ± radio, television, movies, newspapers, and magazines ± which share the features of being for-profit institutions that use

18

John Durham Peters

industrial-era technology to engage in largely monologic transmission to massive audiences. Media sociology arose in the heyday of these media, roughly the

1920s through the 1960s or 1970s, but it is now clear that these definitional

criteria may be valid only for a passing historical moment. Hence a third

definition of media is needed: any vessel of cultural storage, diffusion, or

expression. In this sense, architecture, cities, sculpture, bumper stickers, sky-writing, or the human body could be media, in the same sense that one speaks of

artistic media, such as oil, watercolor, or papier maÃcheÂ. This expanded sense of media is used by thinkers outside of the mainstream of media sociology, such as