A cultural conception of communication

Over the course of the twentieth century, at the same time as “communitarian” ties were being dissolved, information flows became omnipresent. People sought to connect to the world by dealing with long sequences of news and mass media entertainment, through images on the screen and, in the last decades, with the Internet and mobile telecommunications. The Media and information technologies have penetrated the most diverse areas of public and private life, changing our consciousness and our feelings and the whole meaning of social relationships. What today goes by the name of information, besides being a multifaceted reality that has broken down the limits of journalism and those of the Mass media itself, has become the basis of a powerful, international sector of the economy. At a time when, apparently, we have the right degree of freedom and extraordinary technical means to expand those qualitative aspects which are crucial to a good society, such as communication and culture, there are increasingly loud voices questioning the role of the mass media in creating a public arena guided by what Max Weber called ethical or substantive rationality. For many, the discussion with contrasting opinions and the exchange of reasoned arguments have been severely compromised by a flow of information which promotes the supremacy of the visual over the intelligible, the decay of abstract thought and of clear, distinct ideas, encouraging an icon mania, or a passion for the image. Overall, all these have been reducing the potentialities opened up by the modern world to their merely strategic elements. In this essay, while not doubting those negative effects of developments in the information sphere, I seek to understand the persistence of certain ways of thinking about modern society which neither accepts that communication can be reduced to the mere handing over of commoditised information, nor is limited to highlighting the perverse effects of reason and technology progress. My argument takes into account the perennial aspects of communication, namely participatory experience, contact, sharing, commonality, and the establishing of reflexive ties over time between the community and its cultural context. The aim of this research is to contribute to a renewal of a civic, universal and cultural notion of communication. This renewal may usefully draw on neglected ideas such as those of the Chicago School in the 1920s, of the Canadian thinker Harold Innis (1894-1952), the American scholar James Carey and the French Philippe Breton (a sharp critic of the idea of information cybernetics). In the context of the shifts and changes of our age, this type of thinking has significant potential to increasing awareness that communication is only possible by means of those modalities which create experience and the feeling of belonging to a community. The method used in this work tries to answer the following fundamental questions: Within the present omnipresence of the media, aren’t we giving too much importance to the interaction between the human being and the machine, and being driven to a process of social barring? Won’t the informational inflation, under the icon mania, drive us to the exclusion of the individual over himself? Won’t the idea of utopian characteristics in the information society, based on the interaction of the multiple media, constitute another technological utopia, where one waits that technology does what social transformation should have done? The chosen methodology is based on the interpretation and critical debate of the key articles of the referred theorists and studies. The ultimate objective of this debate, following Jeffrey Alexander’s (1988) proposal, is to clarify specific rules and requirements that may give meaning to the chosen texts.

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