In No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1986), Joshua Meyrowitz, argues that electronic media; telegraph, phone, radio, etc..., and especially television influenced politics, personal space, and especially the woman's liberation movement and the 60's generally, leading to the ending of the Vietnam war through information transparency and viewing of personal regions of others generally unknown before them.
Television and other electronic
media creates new social situations that are no longer shaped by
where we are or who is "with" us.
Things normally hidden in every day social life are revealed when
observed through the lense of any electronic media.. Starting with the
phone, electronic media have made porous boundaries blending community
and privacy, subservience and authority, male and female, childhood and
adulthood, leisure and work, etc.
When distinct social situations are combined, once appropriate
behavior may become inappropriate. When a particular private situation becomes more public by being
merged into other situations, behavior style must adapt and change. A
combination of situations changes the patterns of role behavior and
alters the texture of social reality.
Many private forums have
led to the overlapping of many social spheres that were once
distinct.
Electronic medea lead to a nearly total dissociation of physical place
and social "place". Communication and travel were once synonymous. Our
country's communication channels were once roads, waterways and
railroads.
Once how we behaved depended largely on where we were and who we were
with. Public and private places, men and women, superiors and inferiors,
children and adults--all required us to behave in particular ways.
But now these distinctions are becoming blurred. Now Many Americans may no longer seem to 'know their place' because the
traditionally interlocking components of 'place' have been split apart by
electronic media. Wherever one is now--at home, at work, or in a car--one
may be in touch and tuned-in.
Television has lifted many of the veils of secrecy between children and
adults, men and women, and politicians and average citizens. The result
is a series of revolutionary changes, including the blurring of age,
gender, and authority distinctions.
The real power of television comes from its capacity to reach into and
expose behaviour that was once relegated to back regions. “Television creates a shared arena” by
allowing viewers access to political and social settings that were
once shielded from public view. Where political leaders were once distant figures, the mysteries of
their power enhanced by their remoteness, today's politicians are
followed by TV cameras and a media entourage which relentlessly captures
and records their controlled messages as well as their unintended
gaffes, their brave words as well as the fear in their eyes. Moreover
[->
television transports viewers to other places
<-] The poor can see how the wealthy live, Jews and Moslems can watch
how Christmas is celebrated, and Iraqi Generals can watch the U.S.
Congress vote on whether or not to go to war.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Sense-Place-Electronic-Behavior/dp/019504231X
How To Tell The Story Of A Summer Vacation In Europe Mainstreaming
1. Storytelling To Mixed Audiences
When I was a college student I the late 60's, I spent one three month
summer vacation in Europe. I had a wide range of new and exciting
experiences, and when I returned home, I began to share these with my
friends, family, and other people I knew. But I did not give everyone I
spoke to exactly the same account of my trip.
My parents, for example, heard about the safe and clean hotels in which
I stayed and about how the trip had made me less of a picky eater.
In contrast, my friends heard an account filled with danger, adventure,
and a little romance.
My professors heard about the educational aspects of my trip: visits to
museums, cathedrals, historical sites, and observations of
cross-cultural differences in behavior.
Each of my many "audiences" heard a different account.
The stories of my trip varied not only in content, but also in style.
There were varying numbers of slang words, different grammatical
constructions, and different pronunciations. The pace of my delivery,
body posture, facial expressions, and hand gestures were different in
each situation. Each description had its own unique mix of earnestness
and flipancy. My frinds, for example, heard a speech filled with "sloppy
speech" and sarcasm.
Did I lie to any of these people? Not really. But I told them different
truths. I did what most of us do in everyday interactions: I highlighted
certain aspects of my personality and experience and concealed
others.
Consider, for example, what would have happened to the various accounts
of my European vacation if, on my return, my parents had decided to
throw a surprise homecoming party to which they invited all my friends,
relatives, professors, and neighbors. What would have happened to my
description of my trip if I could not have separated my audience? If my
parents had ushered me to the center of a large circle comprised of all
these people and asked me to give a fifteen minute talk on my trip, what
could I have said?
Had I begun to give the "safe" description, that I would have given
privately to my parents, my friends would probably have been bored or
might even have started to giggle. Had I reported on my dangerous or
romantic adventures, my parents and the neighbors might have felt
uncomfortable. Clearly, almost any account designed for a specific
audience would probably have offended or bored parts of the combined
audience. So I might have become tongue-tied or I might have been able
to adapt quickly to the combined situation and devise a new, synthesized
account that said a little bit to each segment of the audience, but was
bland enough to offend no one. But no matter what I said, the situation
would have been profoundly different from the interactions I had with
isolated audiences.
If, for example, I could never get away from the mixed group at my
return party, those things I wanted to say only to my friends would have
to to be spoken in the presences of my parents and professors---or never
said at all. Further, if my parents and professors could never leave the
mixed audience of the party either, then my friend and I would likely
begin to see and hear aspects of their behavior---arguments, illnesses,
doubts, anxieties, sexual behaviors, and so forth---that they had once
kept hidden from us. The new merged patterns of behavior might lack the
extremes of the previously distinct encounters, but they would also
contain many behaviors that were once considered inappropriate in "mixed
company."
At one time physical presence was a prerequisite for first-hand
experience. To see and hear a President speak in his office for example
you had to be with him in his office. If you read his speech in the
newspaper or if you listened to an account given by someone else present
at the time, what you read or heard was at best second-hand information.
Live and mediated communications were once vastly dissimilar this is no
longer the case.
The evolution of media has decreased the significance of physical
presence in the experience of people and events. One can now be an
audience to a social performance without being physically present; one
can communicate "directly" with others without meeting in the same
place. As a result. the physical structures that once divided our
society into many distinct special settings for interaction have been
greatly reduced in social significance.
Even in the home media have reshaped the social significance of
individual rooms. (parent used to be able to send a child to his room to
isolate them from the world but not so with the TV there.)
Traditionally neighborhoods, buildings, and rooms have confined people,
not only physically, but emotionally and psychologically as well. Now,
physically bounded spaces are less significant as information is able to
flow through walls and rush across great distances. As a result, where
one is has less and less to do with what knows and experiences.
Electronic media have altered the significance of time and space for
social interaction.
As the confines of the prison, convent, the family home, the
neighborhood, the executive suite, the university campus, and the oval
office are all invaded through electronics, we must expect a fundamental
shift in our perceptions of our society, our authorities, and
ourselves.
People behave differently in different social "situations," depending
on where one is and who one is with. Behavior in a given situation is
also affected by where one is not, and who is not there. Situations are
usually defined in relation to physical settings: places, rooms,
buildings, and so forth.
The roles we play and witness in our everyday lives are increasingly
being played out before new audiences and in new arenas--"audiences"
that are not physically present and-- "arenas" that do not exist in time
and space. It is about the way individuals and groups have changed their
behaviors to match these new situations.
Electronic media affect social behavior not through the power of their
messages but by reorganizing the social settings in which people
interact and by weakening the once strong relationships between physical
place and social "place."
The structure of social settings is shown to be a key element in all
group identifications, in transitions from role to role, and in the
ranks of social hierarchies. As we loose our old "sense of place," we
gain new notions of appropriate social behavior and identity.
Front Stage Behavior
Erving Goffman described social life as a kind of multi-staged drama in
which we each perform different roles in different social arenas. This
general picture of social interaction is one of people actively involved
in many different dramas: people are constantly changing costumes and
roles, learning and adhering to a complex matrix of conventional
behavior, and working hard to maintain their performance in each ongoing
situation without undermining or threatening their different behaviors
in other situations.
Although people in the 60's were still "playing roles," they were not
playing the same roles that they had played in the past.
Things that were once kept in the "backstage" area of life, such as sex
and drugs, were now being thrust into the public areas.
People were dressing and speaking in public as if they were at home.
Many journalists and scholars were abandoning the public ideal of
"objectivity" and were incorporating their personal experiences and
subjective feelings into their work. There were pressures to break down
old segregations of behaviors and audiences and to treat people of
different sexes, ages, races, and professions more alike.
McLuhan wrote of wide-scale social change, of "retribalization," of the
decline of traditional feelings of nationalism, of the demand on the
part of youth and minorities and others for "in-depth" participation,
and of the distrust of distant authority and attributed such changes to
the widespread use of electronic media.
He described media as extensions of the senses and that the
introduction of a new media to a culture, therefore, changes the
"sensory balance" of the people in that culture and alters their
consciousness.
When different social situations are combined, once appropriate
behavior may become inappropriate. When a particular private situation
becomes more public by being merged into other situations, behavior
style must adapt and change. A combination of situations changes the
patterns of role behavior and alters the texture of social
reality.
The combination of many different audiences is a rare occurrence to
face-to-face interaction, and even when it occurs people can usually
expect the speedy resumption of private isolated
interactions.
Electronic media, however, have rearranged many social forums so
that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways.
And unlike the merged situations in face-to-face interaction, the
combined situations of electronic media are relatively lasting and
inescapable, and they therefore have a much greater effect on social
behavior.
Such restructurings of social arenas and social performances are at
least a partial reason for recent social trends, including the blurring
of conceptions of childhood and adulthood, the merging of notions of
masculinity and femininity, and the lowering of political heroes to the
level of average citizens.
Many of the traditional perceived differences among people of different
social groups, different stages of socialization, and different levels
of authority, were supported by the division of people into very
different experiential worlds.
The separation of people into different situations (or different sets
of situations) fostered different world views, allowed for sharp
distinctions between people's "onstage" and "backstage" behaviors, and
permitted people to play complementary - rather than reciprocal - roles.
Such distinctions in situations were supported by the diffusion of
literacy and printed materials, which tended to divide people into very
different informational worlds based on different levels of reading
skill and on training and interest in different
"literatures."
These distinctions were also supported by the isolation of different
people in different places, which led to different social identities
based on the specific and limited experiences available in given
locations.
By bringing many different types of people to the same "place,"
electronic media have fostered a blurring of many formerly distinct
social roles. Electronic media affect us, then, not primarily through
their content, but by changing the "situational geography" of social
life.
Perhaps the best analogy for the process of change described in this
book is an architectural one.
Under such circumstances, the distinctions between our private and
public selves and between the different selves we project in different
situations might not entirely disappear, but they would certainly
change. We might still manage to act differently with different people,
but our ability to segregate encounters would be greatly diminished. We
could not play very different roles in different situations because the
clear spatial segregation of situations would no longer
exist.
In one large combined social situation, for example, students would see
their teachers falling asleep in front of the television set, blue
collar workers would see corporation presidents being yelled at by their
own children, voters would see politicians have one drink too many,
women would overhear men talking about strategies for interacting with
women, and children would see the sometimes childish behaviors of their
parents. As a result, many types of behavior possible in the past would
no longer be feasible. It would be difficult, for example, to plan
strategies for dealing with people while these very people were
present.
We would have trouble projecting a very different definition of
ourselves to different people when so much other information about us
was available to each of our audiences. Certain behavior patterns that
never existed before, therefore, would come into being. In the combined
setting, some behaviors that were once kept in the "backstage" of each
performance would, of necessity, emerge into the enlarged "onstage"
area.
We would be forced to do and say things in front of others that were
once considered unseemly or rude. The behavior exhibited in this mixed
setting would have many elements of behaviors from previously distinct
encounters, but would involve a new synthesis, a new pattern--in effect,
a new social order.
An outside observer from the old social order might conclude that the
people in this new social system had lost their sense of etiquette and
even, perhaps, their morality and sanity. Yet that observer would, in
fact, be witnessing the effects of a merger of social situations rather
than a conscious decision to behave differently.
The use of this architectural analogy to describe the effects of electronic media is, of course, overstated. Walls, doors, gates, and distances still frame and isolate encounters. But electronic media have increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings.
More and more, the form of mediated communication has come to resemble
the form of live face-to-face interaction. More and more, media make us
"direct" audiences to performances that happen in other places and give
us access to audiences that are not physically present.
While Goffman and many other sociologists tend to think of social roles
in terms of the places in which they are performed, I argue
that
Electronic media have undermined the traditional relationship between
physical setting and social situation. They have created new situations
and destroyed old ones.
One of the reasons many Americans may no longer seem to "know their
place" is that they no longer have a place in the traditional sense of a
set of behaviors matched to physical locations and the audiences found
in them.
A new conception of social situations should include both physical
settings such as rooms and buildings and the "informational settings"
that are created by media. One only has to consider how furniture in the
living room is now arranged around and faces the television set. Before
television the arrangement might have been focused upon other themes and
arranged haphazardly according to personal needs and style.
Media, like physical places, include and exclude participants. Media,
like walls and windows, can hide and they can reveal. Media can create a
sense of sharing and belonging or a feeling of exclusion and isolation.
Media can reinforce a "Them vs Us" feeling or they can undermine
it.
Television and other electronic media create new social situations that
are no longer shaped by where we are or who is "with" us.
Television has rearranged "who knows what about whom," making it
impossible for us to behave with each other in traditional ways.
Television has lifted many of the veils of secrecy between children and
adults, men and women, and politicians and average citizens. The result
is a series of revolutionary changes, including the blurring of age,
gender, and authority distinctions.
The real power of television comes from its capacity to reach into and
expose behavior that was once relegated to back regions. Television
creates a shared arena by allowing viewers access to political and
social settings that were once shielded from public view.
Where political leaders were once distant figures, the mysteries of
their power enhanced by their remoteness, today's politicians are
followed by TV cameras and a media entourage which relentlessly captures
and records their controlled messages as well as their unintended
gaffes, their brave words as well as the fear in their eyes.
Moreover television transports viewers to other places. The poor can
see how the wealthy live, Jews and Moslems can watch how Christmas is
celebrated, and Iraqi Generals can watch the U.S. Congress vote on
whether or not to go to war.
When distinct social situations are combined, once appropriate behavior
may become inappropriate. When a particular private situation becomes
more public by being merged into other situations, behavior style must
adapt and change.
Communication and travel were once synonymous. Our country's
communication channels were once roads, waterways and railroads. But now
electronic media go one step further: They lead to a nearly total
dissociation of physical place and social "place".
Another kind of Space Age placelessness has resulted from the impact of
electronic media on social behavior. Radio, television, telephone, and
computer are in the process of destroying traditional and unique
environments, radically altering the tacit "situational geography" that
has long governed normal behavior.
It is extremely rare for there to be a sudden widespread change in
walls, doors, the layout of a city, or in other architectural and
geographical structures. But the change in situations and behaviors that
occurs when doors are opened or closed and when walls are constructed or
removed is paralleled in our time by the flick of a microphone switch,
the turning on of a television set, or the answering of a
telephone.
Once how we behaved depended largely on where we were and who we were
with. Public and private places, men and women, superiors and inferiors,
children and adults--all required us to behave in particular ways. But
now these distinctions are becoming blurred. Now many Americans may no
longer seem to 'know their place' because the traditionally interlocking
components of 'place' have been split apart by electronic media.
Wherever one is now--at home, at work, or in a car--one may be in touch
and tuned-in.
For the past 50 years electronic media have been eroding the
impermeability of our sense of place. Where once the walls of the
boardroom, office, bar, club, and home were open only to those who were
physically present and social roles were determined by physical or
socioeconomic place, now television, modem, and cellular phones have
erased some of those boundaries.
Merging and overlapping media have exposed most Americans to places and
perspectives that were once beyond our reach. We have, collectively and
singularly, parent and child, man and woman, few secrets anymore. With
no walls to shield or separate our encounters with varying audiences, we
tend to synthesize our behavior, as our experience has been synthesized,
into one common denominator.
As telephones, radios, televisions, and computers increasingly link the
home to the outside world, external behavioral norms begin to merge into
internal ones. The living room, kitchen, and bedroom are being
reintegrated into the larger public realm.
We are becoming a visually nomadic people, hunting and gathering
information. For better and for worse, once unsurpassable boundaries no
longer exist to the same degree. Without traditional boundaries to
define our own place, it becomes more difficult to nourish a sense of
home and personal space. We must define it, then, in mental, emotional,
spiritual, and physical terms.
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior by
Joshua Meyrowitz
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019504231X/
How Participants Became Spectators - Rise of the Industrial City
The Rise of Fascism & Elecronic Media
[Then the Internet became popular and this theory of electronic media
disappeared]
