The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life

The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life

«The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life»

by Paul Frosh

Source:Divinatio (Divinatio), issue: 35 / 2012, pages: 123138, on www.ceeol.com.

http://www.ceeol.com

http://www.ceeol.com

mAIN toPIC: IS DEmoCRACY SICK oF ItS oWN mEDIA?

Paul Frosh

THE SHOWING OF SHAREDNESS: MONSTRATION, MEDIA AND SOCIAL LIFE

2011 and 2012 were confusing, paradoxical years for those concerned about the relationship between media and democracy. Popular movements for political democratization (especially in the Arab world), as well as for widespread social and political change (e.g. the ‘Occupy’ protests), all seem to have been substantially facilitated by networked digital communications and ‘social media’, frequently working in productive symbiosis with more traditional mass media at local, national and transnational levels. At the same time, scandals involving invasive and occasionally illegal journalistic prac-tices have been at the centre of public attention in established democracies, especially the UK, giving rise to demands for increased legislation to protect privacy (UK) and deter libel (Israel), with much of the rhetoric in support of these initiatives focusing on the potentially anti-democratic tendencies that characterize a highly concentrated and powerful mass media.

Solutions to this apparent paradox, where media are simultaneously friend and foe to democracy, are frequently formulated around dichotomies concerning the nature of the media in question. Networked digital technolo-gies are contrasted to traditional mass communications (broadcasting and press); decentralized, dialogical and citizen-led platforms (‘social’ and small media) are opposed to highly centralized, monological and professional media organizations; digital media networks are perceived as a dynamic communicative infrastructure enabling the extension and revitalization of a participatory civil society (Benkler 2006), while traditional media – the institution that, as Nick Couldry (2009) notes, we still designate with the definite article as ‘the media’ – are understood as a separate sphere in which symbolic power is concentrated, wielded and disguised. In short, ‘new’ dig-

124

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

ital media, whose very communicative properties appear to perform demo-cratic values (decentralized architecture, dialogical discourse, full partici-pation), are pitted against ‘old’ mass media: for while the latter may have served liberal democracies in various systemic ways, they have, in their own hierarchical and unaccountable structures, remained far from democratic.

These dichotomies are, of course, themselves highly problematic, which is not to say that they are false but that they crystallize problems for analysis and debate. Much of this debate is being carried on at present under the aegis of the useful but rather unattractive term ‘mediatization’, which highlights a threefold confluence: first, the increasing mediation of everyday life – the ubiquity and even priority of technologically mediated communication in the experiences and behavior of ordinary individuals; second, the separation and consolidation of ‘the media’ as a key social institution; and third, the adaptation and, in some accounts, subservience of other social institutions (politics, the economy, the judiciary, religion, the military) to the temporal, spatial and organizational ‘logics’ of the media (see, among others, Altheide and Snow 1979; Schultz 2004, Stromback 2008, Hjarvard 2008). Mediatiza-tion thus links the institutional power of media to the increasing mediation of everyday lifeworlds. Central to understanding this link is an account of how media systems – including different kinds of media – enable and con-strain the distribution of discursive practices, communicative competencies and socio-political connections in everyday experience.

Yet valuable and important as the work around mediatization frequent-ly is, it has tended to focus more on the contentious shift between its second and third aspects – the extent of the media’s institutional power vis-à-vis other institutions – and less on how institutional mediatization is implicated in the mediation of ordinary experience and behavior (though there are some important exceptions: for instance, Harvard 2009 and Rothenbuler 2009).1 This means that some of the core conceptual and practical intersections between everyday life and politics are left relatively undertheorized. Per-haps chief among these is how media give form to publics, and with what consequences. This is a venerable though somewhat exasperating topic in the history of communication research, from late 19th and early 20th cen-tury thinkers (Tarde 1901/1969, Dewey 1927 and Lippmann 1922, to name only a few) to Habermas (1962) and post-Habermasian writers (Fraser 1993, Warner 2002, Thompson 1995, Calhoun 1999). The notion of the ‘public’ throughout this history designates a type of social relation intrinsically and uniquely dependent on communication, a body of individuals united through the circulation of discourse. Communication systems do not therefore im-

Access via CEEOL NL Germany

125


pact the ‘public’ from the outside, they are a condition of its existence; the public is not antecedent to mediation, it is its product.

Daniel Dayan, in a recent intervention (2009) about television and new media, has given a stark and suggestive answer to this question of how me-dia shape publics (or better still, forms of publicness): they do so through the regulation of attention. Dayan gives this regulation a name, ‘monstration’, and further characterizes its principal operational modes as sharedness and showing, connectivity and display. In what follows I hope to offer some brief thoughts on how monstration and its modes offer an important and power-ful conceptual underpinning to everyday public life and communication. Intertwining questions of perception, the social experience of connectivity, media performance and media infrastructure, ‘monstration’ helps to specify the linkages between the mediation of everyday lifeworlds, the imagination of social structures, and the forces of institutional mediatization. I will also offer some conceptual supplements to Dayan’s original conceptualization, building on his initial insights about sharing and showing to discuss how sharing is habitually and routinely displayed by media systems, and suggest-ing what this display of sharing augurs for individuals’ tacit understanding of the socio-political order.

Monstration: Attention as Energy

Monstration is the name that Dayan gives to the gesture – of institu-tions, individuals, media and texts – that produces and organizes forms of attention. This gesture is often not perceivable as a phenomenon that is sepa-rate from what it shows; nevertheless, it both enables and is reiterated by the utterance it offers. Working within and elaborating on J.L. Austin’s (1976) notion of the performative, the gesture is the instruction and expectation to attend that accompanies a communicative utterance – an image or text – and that makes sense of and gives purpose to the utterance’s very existence.

Two features of the monstrating gesture are significant. The first is that it can be performed on a variety of different spatial, temporal and social scales. The individual can monstrate by showing someone a personal pho-tograph (the gesture: a held image, a pointing figure, the implied command ‘look!’), but institutions and their technologies monstrate as well: this is in fact the primary gesture (and telos) of journalism and the arts. This insti-tutionalization means that monstration not only operates on collectives as well as individuals, but also that it is made permanent – it is, in our society, never not being performed. The permanence and scale of monstration, made

126

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

possible by the creation of distinct organizations, structures and professions devoted to its performance, is at its core the story of the rise of modern mass media, the emergence of ‘publicity’ as a separate sphere of operation and expertise, and one of the key features of contemporary life informing the current discussion of mediatization.

Yet the second feature of monstration is no less important than its mul-tiscalar operation. This is the suggestion that the gesture of monstration is far from uniform: its performance covers a range of modes by which atten-tion is demanded and produced. Or, as Dayan puts it, by which attention is modulated (2009: 25). This modulation can be in scope and intensity (the quantity of attention) and in style (the quality of attention). It is instructive to note the semantic fields from which Dayan draws his terminology, a com-bination of aesthetics (style, quality) and engineering (scope, modulation): attention is perceived as a kind of circulatory somatic energy – a wave or signal – that is fundamental to communication, since while it is produced in the act of communicating, it is also the anti-inertial force that drives the creation of texts and utterances in the first place. It is therefore no accident that Dayan uses the term ‘gesture’: monstration is a motion expressing an energy and exerting a force.

Given the predominance of the visual image in many of Dayan’s exam-ples, it is tempting to see ‘monstration’ as pertaining only to ‘showing’ – and there are sections of his work which do suggest that sharedness is of another order to monstration, that it is a different story. Monstration is concerned with the management of attention through the performance of communi-cative acts. It seems only natural therefore that it should apply primarily to performative and representational issues, to questions of how a world and its actors are designated, depicted and displayed through the genres and representational practices of a particular medium. Sharedness, in seem-ing contrast, is about the extension of communicative participation across space – through media infrastructures, and across time – through temporal sychronization and mnemonic practices.

Yet sharedness is also concerned with the management of attention. In fact, it is fair to say that the spatial and temporal regulation of audience at-tention is a pre-condition for communicative participation. The sharedness of televisual liveness, for instance, refers to the coordination and direction of group attention towards the same texts and events in a common spatio-temporal field (the national – and increasingly global – present). Sharedness is about the distribution of gestures of showing across a population. It would appear, therefore, that while ‘showing’ concerns the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of

127


monstration – attention as technique and representation, sharedness is about the ‘where, when and who’ of monstration – attention as infrastructure. And it is through sharedness as the infrastructure of monstration, more perhaps than through overt and visible showing, that the fundamental circulatory work of attention takes place, as a communicative energy connecting indi-viduals, social frameworks, publics and institutions.

Key questions then arise: does sharedness itself come to be shown in media systems? And if it does, how is it represented? The importance of these questions has to do with the analytical value of self-reference: by showing its own infrastructure of sharedness a media system reflexively invokes and abstracts an image of itself, thereby creating what Rotman calls a ‘ghost effect’, an ‘hypostasized effect of communicational media’ (2007: 58), that becomes deeply naturalized as the origin rather than the product of the sys-tem which has produced it (Rotman’s key ‘founding ghost abstractions’ for the technology of writing – and its self-referential use of personal pronoun ‘I’ – are the ‘invisible God and unembodied Mind’ (Rotman 2007: 54)).2 In asking how sharing is shown, how media systems represent their own ap-paratus of sharing, we can begin to picture the ‘ghost effects’ produced by these systems: the tacit images formed through them of the communicative and social order.

Representing Sharedness

Obviously the notion of representation refers to the arena of showing in communications and political life. As a central idea both in communications and in modern democratic theory, representation combines three kinds of practice, which while analytically distinguishable are in reality complexly interdependent. First, representation refers to the substitution of one object for another (the sign for the object or idea it represents; the parliamentary deputy ‘standing in place of’ or operating ‘on behalf of’ a given constitu-ency); second, it concerns the making present of an absent object to the senses and consciousness (the depictive imitation or simulation of a refer-ent; the parliamentary body as a miniaturized and co-present aggregation of the interests and voices of the entire citizenry); and third, it involves the maintenance of a connection between the representation and its substituted or simulated object (the symbolic, iconic and indexical orders of the sign according to Pierce (1932); the diverse understandings of political deputa-tion – for instance, ‘mandate’ versus ‘independence’ (Pitkin 1967) models of parliamentary representation).

128

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

It is this third component of representation – the nature of the connec-tion involved in representational orders – that I would like to emphasize as being central to how sharedness is monstrated. This is because it is through the display of connectivity to publics that their own involvement in a media and social system is routinely enacted and made available to conscious-ness. Dayan’s work with Elihu Katz on ‘media events’ (1992) is very much concerned with displays that reveal the infrastructure of collective attention, that show sharedness. The televised ceremonial media event both performs and reiterates through its images and commentary – ‘we are all here today together’ – not simply a social experience of connectivity, but a heightened sense of communal belonging, driven by a particular infrastructure of atten-tion, that links individuals and groups to a social and political centre in syn-chronous time. The monstrating techniques of the media event reveal and re-affirm their own infrastructural form – the live, monological and centralized system of broadcast-era television: it is this infrastructure that is mapped onto and turned into a display and an experience of the social order.3

Yet it is not simply in the exceptional cases of televised media events that the infrastructure of shared attention is displayed, or that it is turned into an experience of the social order. Crucially, its display – the showing of sharedness – is a matter of routine habituation, a routine which changes as new media technologies, and alternate ways of organizing media, lead to shifts in the experience and performance of social connectivity. To un-derstand how the showing of sharedness is routinely performed, we need to brace ourselves for a central paradox. This paradox is that sharedness – the infrastructure of attention – is habitually and routinely shown through forms of presentation that we would regard as inattentive, as unremarkable and inconspicuous, evading notice to such a degree that it is almost nonsensi-cal to call them ‘showing’ at all. This paradox will require a considerable expansion of the notion of ‘monstration’.

Phatic Monstration

To begin to unravel the paradox, we first need to think carefully about how we use the term ‘attention’ and its apparent opposite, inattention. Atten-tion has been much discussed in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Most pertinently, perhaps, modern and contemporary media-saturated cultures have been characterized as cultures of distraction, noise, overload, interruption and indifference. The sheer quantity of stimuli and the ubiquity of media, increasingly augmented by new technologies and

129


practices of replication and dissemination, threaten to overwhelm the in-dividual’s ability to interpret, engage with and act upon particular acts of display – and singular images and texts – in meaningful ways. From Sim-mel and Benjamin, through to more recent work by Norman Bryson, Anne Friedberg, Jonathan Crary, John Ellis and John Caldwell, theorists of society and media have grappled with the complex implications of modernity’s cul-ture of distraction.

What is apparent from many of these thinkers however is that atten-tion and inattention are not in any simple way antithetical. Rather, to take the Foucauldian argument of Jonathan Crary as an example, we need to think of these terms as implicated in more general ideologies and practices devoted to the management of perception – especially visual mobility and immobilization. The production of attention and inattention are therefore mutually connected to overall strategies for both controlling and empower-ing the contemporary spectator (Crary 1992, 2002). Hence inattention is not a deficiency, but a positively produced outcome.

So, to think carefully about inattention means to conceptualize it not as the absence of attentive energy, but rather as a different kind of modulation of that energy (hence: a monstration): one lower in amplitude and intensity, and different in quality, from conspicuously engaging acts of display, but not a lack, and certainly not without consequences. As a monstration, the routinely modulated inattentive forms through which sharedness is shown should be considered as types of social-material practice.

I mean two things by this. First, inattention is an embodied routine, organized by practical knowledge. We – our bodies, eyes, hands, minds – ‘know’ (as Goffman knew) how to be civilly inattentive in public places (Goffman 1966), just as we (bodies, eyes, hands, minds) ‘know ‘ how to watch television routinely, or how to flip through magazines and superfi-cially scan newspaper images and texts without giving the process much thought. Second, we know how to do these things in relation to material artifacts – media technologies and texts – that are designed to enable us to do them unthinkingly (this is, in Paddy Scannell’s terms, their ‘care struc-ture’ (Scannell, forthcoming)). These artifacts are not neutral instruments through which our practices are realized; they are co-agents of their social constitution and re-production. They are, as Reckwitz says, “materialized understanding”’ (Reckwitz 2002: 212). Hence it is no accident that media technologies are designed to ‘afford’ the routine, unthinking modulation of attention in highly efficient ways: contemporary newspaper graphics, for instance – bold headlines, large images, clear separation between stories and

130

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

textual units – are designed not simply to ‘attract’ the eye to particular ele-ments, but also to enable it to more effectively scan and move across them without necessarily having to decipher each element in depth.

How then do media systems show their own infrastructure of shared-ness in routine, inattentive ways? How do they produce a routine modula-tion of weakly attentive energy that nevertheless makes visible the contours of sharedness and gives shape to our experience of the social order?

Now, there is a communicative function that is heavily routinized, relatively undemanding of attention to particular semantic content, and yet fundamental to social connection: the phatic function. As Jakobson (1960) describes it, this serves ‘to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue commu-nication, to check whether the channel works (Hello, do you hear me?), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention’ (Jakobson 1960, p. 355). Jakobson’s definition is an instrumentalized version of Malinowski’s earlier notion of ‘phatic communion’, defined as ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’ (Ma-linowski 1923, p. 315) irrespective of those words’ informational content. For Malinowski, phatic communion is an expression of fundamental human sociability among multiple others that fulfils ‘the mere need of companion-ship’. It is a performance of connectedness between individuals and their social whole that is ‘one of the bedrock aspects of man’s nature in society’ (Malinowski 1923, p. 314). Significantly, phatic utterances and exchanges are performed without the conscious reflection or intention of their speakers or the attentive semantic engagement of their recipients (Malinowski 1923, p. 315): they operate as a kind of communicative reflex.

Phatic communion is not limited to linguistic performance. It is a com-municative dimension of modern media systems. Our experience of tel-evision, for instance, is informed not only by our exposure to particular transmissions, which we view with varying degrees of concentration and involvement, but also by our habitual recognition of the potential for trans-missibility and connection that the television enables and symbolizes (Mey-rovitz, 1986). More than this: the phatic connectivity of electronic transmis-sion technologies has come to condition, in fundamental ways, our psychic and social orientation to the world. Imagine waking up one morning, and before opening the curtains or shades, turning on the radio. It produces only hiss. You switch on the television: it displays only the ‘snow’ that shows there is no incoming signal. You check your computer and its internet con-nection is not working, which also fails to work for your other wired and wireless computer devices. Finally, your mobile phone registers that no con-

131


nection is available. How do you interpret this sudden isolation, an isolation that has nothing to do with any possible expectations about the particular content you might receive, and that has everything to do with the routine ex-perience and expectation of phatic connectivity made possible by electronic media technologies? Of course: it is the end of the world.4

The idea of phatic communion as a fundamental yet largely tacit fea-ture of audience experience involves a shift in our thinking about audience receptivity to acts of showing. It makes clear that the barely noticed ground of mediated connectivity is an astonishing ecological achievement: audi-ences can disengage from particular media texts and specific performances of display without relinquishing the infrastructure of monstration – without severing the sharedness with others, and connectivity to ‘the social’, that media systems routinely ‘show’ on the most implicit of levels of technologi-cal habituation. Hence the idea of the phatic allows us to understand how sharedness is habitually communicated, how it is shown even though it does not demand attention with insistence: indeed, how sharedness and connec-tivity are always at the bedrock of what is being communicated.5

Monstrating the Socio-Political Order: The Interpellative Image

However, we have yet to think about how phatic communion gives shape to our sense of what the infrastructure of sharedness is like in a given media system, and how that ties in to the experience of connectedness to a socio-political order. The significant point here is that phatic communion is not unorganized or without structure. Phatic utterances, as linguists have noted (Laver, 1975), are not as semantically empty as Malinowski suggested: “all utterances, phatic or otherwise, mean contrastively by being differenti-ated from other possible utterances, as well as silence, in the context of their use” (Coupland, Coupland and Robinson 1992: 212). Their semantic con-tent may not be salient to interlocutors, but it is not irrelevant: not anything can qualify as a recognizably phatic utterance, and not every potential phatic utterance is appropriate in every context. The appropriateness is determined both by the structure of legitimate relationships between interlocutors (level of acquaintanceship, for instance, or degrees of class proximity) and by a lexical repertoire associated with cultural norms and social positions. This means that the display of connectivity always uses forms of address and re-sponse that invoke and imply the overall communicative and socio-political order in which interlocutors are operating.

132

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

Similarly, the phatic dimension of media systems interpellates audi-ences – to use a good old Althusserian term (1984) – in ways that produce an image of the socio-political order that they are connected to.6 This interpel-lative or phatic image is a by-product of what we can call the media system’s ‘authorship schema’, and of its mode of address. An authorship schema is the implicit conception audiences have of the entity or system responsible for addressing them (Wayne Booth’s ‘implied author’ (1961) would be a literary example of an authorship schema), while mode of address refers to the implicit understanding audiences have of what kinds of entities they are being addressed as.

Take, as an illustration, the comparison between the phatic images of mass broadcasting media and networked digital media. The authorship schema of mass broadcasting television is a remote, impersonal transmit-ting agent – a large bureaucratic media organization – speaking into the air or across the wires to a large anonymous audience situated around it via their own (usually domestic) termini: individual television sets. Particu-lar individuals may front for or act as the face of that transmitting agent (news anchors, well-known presenters), but it is understood that they are not identical to the transmitting agent itself. They are merely, to use Goff-man’s (1981) useful distinction between speaking roles, the ‘animators’ of the uttterance (those who give it voice) and occasionally its ‘authors’ (those who have formulated it), but they are almost never the ‘principal’ of the enunciation: those who originate, authorize and take responsibility for it. The principal is the broadcasting channel or media organization; it is they who monstrate. And this principal authorizes identical messages to be issued from a shared location of discourse, a location which is not necessarily one particular physical place (a building, a transmitter), but a remote point of communicative and enunciative origin situated outside our individual tel-evision sets, disseminating messages as a kind of radiation that gathers ad-dressees around it (Adams 1992).

In contrast, the mode of address of television – the implicit understand-ing conveyed to audiences about how their addressers see them – simulta-neously positions viewers as part of a large anonymous collective and as particular individuals (Scannell, 1996; Tolson, 1996). Like radio, it system-atically invokes of forms of “parasocial” interaction with viewers (Horton and Wohl, 1956), or creates what Scannell (2000) calls a “for-anyone-as-someone” communicative structure, where programmes are broadcast to be seen by anyone who happens to be watching, and yet are verbally and visu-ally presented (through, for instance, informal conversational registers and

133


direct address) to engage each viewer as a particular individual ‘someone’. Hence the phatic image of the social-political order routinely produced here connects individuals as termini of a centrally organized, institutionally gov-erned, large-scale social totality. This connectivity is not performed through intervening social formations – groups, communities, associations – but by virtue of a technological infrastructure that appears to radiate outwards from a central point while splicing together social generality and individual par-ticularity, the logic of statistics (audience measurement) and the logic of intimate conversation (informal talk and direct address). This is the shape of the sharedness that traditional broadcast television habitually shows, and it suits a social and political order characterized by the pairing of individuals to large institutions and organizations, bypassing the dynamic mid-range agglomerations of clan, friendship, acquaintance and community that make up the associational ‘civic’ life of societies between the immediate family and the state. It is not that these associational networks are not depicted in mass broadcasting – they are indeed a staple of much programming (soap operas, for instance): it is that they are not included within the underlying phatic image of communicative sharedness that is routinely and continually monstrated.

The phatic structure of networked digital media, in contrast, produces a different kind of image of the socio-political order and our connection to it. To begin with, as Vincent Miller (2008) has noted recently, networked digital platforms have given rise to an escalation of overtly phatic forms of expres-sion. Miller describes the shift from narrative modes of mediated personal interaction to more truncated utterances in so-called social media: the twit-ter text, for instance, that announces to its ‘followers’ the momentous news that one is eating ‘Waffles at 10am for breakfast: Yum! Yum!’ Miller argues that this change in the nature of utterances favoured by contemporary media is making ours an increasingly ‘phatic culture’, concerned primarily with the gaining of attention and the maintenance of social connectivity rather than with the quality of information (I should add that he is not necessarily critical of this development). However, I do not think that this shift is simply about the quantity of phatic expressions that are now visible: as I have said, all media technologies perform phatic functions, and perform them perpetu-ally. What has shifted is how sharedness is displayed, the infrastructure of attention – and with it the phatic behaviour that shows this infrastructure on a routine basis and produces through it a model of the social order.

Let us return to the concepts of authorship schema and mode of ad-dress. The authorship schema of networked digital media is that I can be

134

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

addressed by formal organizations (including states and corporations), in-formal groups and associations, and individuals, at the same time and in the same way, and that those who address me are not simply animators or authors in Goffman’s sense, but often principals too: they originate, author-ize and take responsibility for their utterances. Most significantly perhaps, is that so-called social media platforms position potential addressees within fluid and intermediate social formations – the networks of connective social ties now suddenly made visible and manipulable (our ‘contacts’, our face-book ‘friends’) – that link individuals to each other and to the larger social totality. Those initiating and authorizing enunciation have become visibly nodal, constantly intersecting with other nodes in an interminable multi-sca-lar weave of social ties: in Skype and messaging systems you can see when I am ‘online’ (and when I go offline) even when I am not communicating with you. This means that the authorship schema, though it can be as impersonal as mass media, tends to be highly individuated: when I am addressed it is through or by other named individuals whose connection to me – however tenuous – is put on display. And frequently other individuals, but virtue of their connection to me, can see that I have been thus addressed.

The mode of address of networked digital media is also usually highly individuated, as the trends towards technologically enhanced commercial profiling and message tailoring make plain (Turow 2006). I am increasingly addressed as a (named) individual, frequently by strangers, organizations or automated software replicating human discourse: Althusser’s famous scene of ideological hailing and recognition, where one is addressed as ‘Hey You’, is steadily giving way (in my case) to ‘Hey Paul’. Additionally, I too am made visible to my addressors as a communication node – a potential animator, author or principal in my own right – rather than postulated (via broadcasting ratings systems) as the terminus of transmission. So rather than a communicative structure of ‘for anyone as someone’, networked digital media seem to propose something new: ‘to anyone through someone’.

The image of the socio-political order produced by this shift in how sharedness is shown, in how the infrastructure of connectivity and atten-tion is ‘monstrated’, is still in flux – but it seems to chime with Hjarvard’s (2009) claim that the contemporary mediatization of everyday lifeworlds (rather than social and political institutions) is based on the increased sig-nificance of weak social ties and the consequent development of ‘soft indi-vidualism’. This is not necessarily a paean to the virtues of network society over mass or industrial societies and their media: there is no reason that the phatic image of networked digital media systems need be any less mythical

135


than the phatic image of mass broadcasting. The latter splices individuals to centralizing institutions while eliding the associational life of civil society; the former turns individuals, groups and institutions into mobile particles in associational webs made suddenly visible and amenable to new forms of ‘sharing’ (see John (forthcoming)), collaboration, management and exploi-tation, eliding the scalar and power differences between them. The latter fails to imagine everyday civil society as part of its monstrating apparatus, risking the disconnection of social life and institutional politics, while the former fails to imagine that institutional politics might be different in kind, rather than different in degree, from the monstrating apparatus of the tech-nologized (social) network.

Conclusion: Monstration and Imagination

My argument has progressed, by twists and turns, from the concept of mediatization, to the value of monstration as an account of how public atten-tion is regulated, to the relationship between sharedness and showing, and finally to how forms of routine monstration involve audiences in habitual ways of imagining their connection to the social whole and the nature of the social order. What I am arguing, in other words, is that any account of the political roles of contemporary media needs to think about the communica-tive and perceptual ground upon which societies engage in world-creation, imagining themselves and their institutions into being, and conferring real-ity and stability on what is imagined. Monstration, as Dayan describes it, is a gesture modulating attentive energy. The energy that is modulated – shown, shared, stabilized and recycled – is connective, sociable, but it is also self-reflexively imaginative; it directs attention to what societies imagine them-selves to be out of the myriad possibilities of social and political life (Casto-riardis 1987), both through overt showing and ceremonial media events, and in the tacit conceptions and phatic orientations produced in daily engage-ments with media systems. Monstration, then, is not simply a conceptual tool that can supplement accounts of mediatization in answer to questions about institutional power-relations within democratic systems. It is a con-cept that gives access to a deep politics, concerned with how media systems channel and shape – show and share – a society’s perpetual self-imagining.

136

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

Notes1 On the relationship between ‘mediation’ and ‘mediatization’ see Livingstone

(2009).2 The invisibility and disembodiment of enunciators are consequences of writing

technologies, but through writing they are hypostasized – turned into abstract entities – which are then elevated as the source of the written texts that produced them.

3 The real or mythical status of the sense of community created by televised media events, and the social and political centre such events produce (or refer to), is a matter of some controversy (Couldry 2003). In this article I remain agnostic on this question, stressing only that the effects of communal belonging and orienta-tion to a centre are the outcomes of particular media practices and infrastructures, and that if as a result these effects are imagined or mythical, their consequences are nevertheless real.

4 I have not mentioned perhaps the key phatic medium here: electricity. Notwith-standing your media devices’ sudden loss of connectivity, if your electricity sup-ply is working then clearly the outside world is intact.

5 The act of excommunication is the oxymoronic limit-case to this communicative ground: receiving a communication that you are beyond communication.

6 Though Althusser does not refer to phatic communion, his examples of the fun-damental forms of social recognition involved in ideological hailing and inter-pellation are provocatively close to notions of the phatic, with the added insight that such interpellation is of concrete individuals who – through greeting old acquaintances on the street, in one example (1984: 46) – are thereby recognized as subjects of the socio-political order.

Bibliography

Adams, P. (1992). ‘Television as Gathering Place’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82(1): 117-135.

Altheide, D. L., & Snow, R. P. (1979). media Logic. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Althusser, L. (1976). Essays on Ideology. London: Verso.Austin, J. L. (1976). How to Do things With Words. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.Benkler. Y. (2006). the Wealth of Networks: How Social Production trans

forms markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, New Haven.Booth, W. (1961). the Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.Castoriadis, C. (1987). the Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Po-

lity Press.

137


Calhoun, C. (1999). ‘Nationalism, Political Community and the Representa-tion of Society. Or, Why Feeling at Home is not a Substitute for Public Space’, European Journal of Social theory 2(2): 217-231.

Couldry, N. (2003). media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge.Couldry, N. (2009). ‘Does “the Media” Have a Future?’ European Journal of

Communication 24(4) 437-449.Coupland, J., Coupland N. and Robinson, J. (1992) ‘“How are you?” Negoti-

ating Phatic Communion.’ Language in Society 21: 207-230.Crary, J. (1992). techniques of the observer: on Vision and modernity in the

Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Crary, J. (2002). Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and modern

Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Dayan, D. (2009). ‘Sharing and Showing: Television as Monstration’. the An

nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 625: 19-31.Dayan, D. and Katz, E. (1992). media Events: the Live Broadcasting of His

tory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Dewey, J. (1927). the Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt.Fraser, N. (1993). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Cri-

tique of Actually Existing Democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. (pp. 109 –142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. New York: The Free Press.

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Habermas, J. (1962). the Structural transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Knowledge. (pp. 27 –38). The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

Hjarvard, S. (2008). The Mediatization of Society: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change. Nordicom Review 29 (2): 105-134.

Hjarvard, S. (2009). Soft Individualism: Media and the Changing Social Char-acter. In Knut Lundby (ed.) mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang, 159-178.

Horton, D. and Wohl, R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social inter-action: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19: 215-29.

Jakobson, R., (1960). ‘Linguistics and poetics’. In T. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: 350-77.

John, N. (forthcoming) “Sharing and Web: 2.0The emergence of a keyword,” New media & Society.

Laver, J., (1975). ‘Communicative Functions of Phatic Communion. In A. Kendon, R. M. Harris, and M. R. Key (Eds.) the organization of Behavior in FacetoFace Interaction. The Hague, Mouton: 215-38.

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

138

DIV

INAT

IO, v

olum

e 35

, spr

ing-

sum

mer

201

2

Paul Frosh

Livingstone, S. (2009). On the Mediation of Everything. Journal of Communication 59: 1-18.

Malinowski, B. (1923). ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages. C. K.Ogden and I. A. Richards, the meaning of meaning. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul: 296-355.

Meyrovitz, J. (1986). ‘Television and Interpersonal Behaviour: Codes of Per-ception and Response.’ In Gumpert G. and Cathcart R. Intermedia: Interpersonal Communication in a media World. 3rd edition. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 253-272.

Miller, V. (2008). ‘New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture’, Convergence 14(4): 387–400.

Peirce, C. S. (1932). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 2. Elements of Logic. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Pitkin, H. (1967). the Concept of Political Representation. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press.

Reckwitz, A. (2002). ‘The Status of the “Material” in Theories of Culture: From “Social Structure” to “Artefacts”’. Journal for the theory of Social Behaviour 32(2): 195-217.

Rothenbuler, E. (2009). Continuities: Communicative Form and Institution-alization. In Knut Lundby (ed.) mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang, 277-292.

Rotman, B. (2007). ‘Ghost Effects’. Differences 18(1): 53-86.Scannell, P. (1996). Radio, television and modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell.Scannell, P. (2000). ‘For-anyone-as-someone structures.’ media, Culture and

Society, 22(1): 5-24.Scannell, P. (forthcoming) television and the meaning of Live. Cambridge:

Polity Press.Schulz, W. (2004). Reconstructing mediatization as an analytical concept. Eu

ropean Journal of Communication, 19, 87–101.Strömbäck, J. (2008). Four Phases of Mediatization: An Analysis of the Me-

diatization of Politics. the International Journal of Press/Politics 13(3): 228-246Tarde, G (1901/1969).“The Public and the Crowd” in on Communication and

Social Influence. Chicago: Chicago University Press: 277- 294.Thompson, J. B., (1995). the media and modernity: A social theory of the

media. Cambridge: Polity Press.Tolson, A., (1996). mediations: text and discourse in media studies. London:

Arnold.Turow, J. (2006). Niche Envy: marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press.Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public Culture, 14(1): 49–

90.

The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life

Documents

Transcript of The Showing of Sharedness: Monstration, Media and Social Life