Carey's Communication as Culture

James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society 1989.

Czitrom sez: "the limits of mainstream American communications research and the need for a cultural studies approach, the critique of technological determinism, the historical analysis of the contradictory impact of new communications technologies. "

David Silver says: "In this seminal book, Carey attempts nothing less than to recast the project of communication studies. Part I weds the fields of cultural studies and communication studies by redefining communication. Drawing from the work of John Dewey and Raymond Williams, Carey argues for the need to separate communication into two views -- the transmission view and the ritual view -- thereby reinterpreting communication to include both imparting/sending ideas and sharing/participating with ideas. Having laid down a firm theoretical foundation, Carey uses Part II to examine the roles (both real and mythic) played by communication technologies in American society. Especially strong essays include "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution" (see above) and "Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph.""

Robert Craig's slide shows and summaries.

DANIEL CZITROM review : "The key role played by communications technology in shaping the republic, and he persuasively. ... shows us how to deepen our understanding of American history and culture by rethinking our basic assumptions and metaphors about communication, media, and technology." 679

"Outlines and extends an American intellectual tradition as our best hope for understanding media and democratizing scholarly discourse on communication. A social theorist, Carey emerges as the missing American link to the British tradition of cultural studies. He effectively demonstrates the connections between his American heroes -John Dewey, William James, Harold Innis, and Perry Miller, to name a few-and the ideas of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall." 679

COMMUNICATION AS CULTURE
--------1. A Cultural Approach to Communication
Czitrom: "builds on the work of John Dewey in Experience and Nature and Democracy and Education in order to distinguish what Carey terms transmission from ritual views of communication. The transmission model, rooted in metaphors of geography and transportation, conceives of communication as "a process whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people" (15). This conception has been dominant in American thought and culture, and, as Carey illustrates with the work of Perry Miller, the transmission view regularly has been linked with religious and moral claims for establishing and extending God's kingdom on earth. Samuel Morse asked "What Hath God Wrought" in his famous first telegraph message in 1844; since then, every technological advance in communications has generated a religiously inflected rhetoric celebrating moral, political, and social improvement. By contrast, the ritual view of communication is much older than transmission, as is implied by the linguistic ties between "communication," "communion," and "community." It is directed "not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs" (18). Here the central meaning of the communication process is understood to lie not in the transmission of information at a distance but "in the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world (680) that can serve as a control and container for human action" (18-19). Whereas a transmission view of the news, for example, focuses on the press as an agent for disseminating information and changing attitudes, a ritual view sees news writing and reading as dramatic acts, inviting our participation in an arena of dramatic forces and action. The ritual view has been a relatively minor strain in American thought, Carey argues, partly because the transmission view has fit more closely into our scientific and political discourse and partly because "the concept of culture is such a weak and evanescent notion in American social thought" (19). Drawing on Dewey and his descendants in the Chicago School (Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Park, George Herbert Mead, and Erving Goffman), as well as the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, Carey offers a new definition of communication aimed at redressing the imbalance: "a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed" (23). Recasting the meaning of communication along the lines of the ritual model allows Carey to open up the study of communication far beyond the confines of mass media: Our attempts to construct, maintain, repair, and transform reality are publicly observable activities that occur in historical time. We create, express, and convey our knowledge of and attitudes toward reality through the construction of a variety of symbol systems: art, science, journalism, religion, common sense, mythology. How do we do this? What are the differences between these forms? What are the historical and comparative variations in them? How do changes in communication technology influence what we can concretely create and apprehend? How do groups in society struggle over the definition of what is real? These are the questions, rather too simply put, that communication studies must answer. (30-31) "

--------2. Mass Communication and Cultural Studies
Laura Sells' notes on first 2 chapters: Mass Communication scholar James W. Carey compares two views or models of communication, the “ritual” model and the “transmission” model. These two views of values associated with them, and emphasize different aspects of communication. The transmission model comes from the traditional social-scientific Sender- Message- Channel- Receiver or S-M-C-R approach whereas the ritual model comes from the social constructionist paradigm. Although he primarily refers to mass media, and particularly journalism, his comparison fits for public speaking as well. In fact, most communication textbooks, including public speaking, begin with the transmission model of communication. The following are excerpts, quotes, and paraphrases from the first two chapters of the book Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

The most important single change in human consciousness in the last century, and especially in the American consciousness, has been the multiplying of the means and forms of what we call "communication." Modern communications have drastically altered the ordinary terms of experience and consciousness, the ordinary structures of interest and feeling, the normal sense of being alive, of having a social relation. Technological extensions and resettlement could never unload the instincts and necessities of an ancient past outside history. We remained possessed by that which we no longer quite possessed: rituals and narratives that are in the strict sense anthropological. Democracies are limited to range of foot and tongue. America is an oral democracy. Reading the news is a dramatic ritual act. [The news is ] not information but a portrayal of contending forces in the world. [The ritual model is not about] information acquisition, though that's part, but of dramatic action in which the reader joins a world of contending forces as an observer at a play. News is not information but drama, part of the ritual actions of everyday social life.

Ritual Model of Communication -- communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Communication--most common and mundane of human experiences; difficult to recognize just like the fish doesn't recognize water; communication creates the ambience (water) of human existence.

Assumptions about the relationship between communication and reality in the transmission model:
1. a real world of objects, events, and processes that we observe.
2. language or symbols name these events in the real world and create more or less adequate descriptions of them.
3. there is a reality and then, after the facts, our accounts of it.
4. distinction between reality and fantasy
5. our terms stand in relation to this world as shadow and substance.
6. language distorts and confuses our perception of external world; we peel away semantic layers of terms and meanings to uncover more substantial domain of existence.

Assumptions about the relationship between communication and reality in the ritual model (invert the transmission model’s relationship of communication to reality):
1. reality is not given, not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which language mirrors.
2. Rather, reality is brought into existence, produced by communication, by the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.
3. Reality is not a mere function of symbolic forms, but is produces by humans that focus existence in specific terms.
4. Reality is not there to discover in any significant detail

Symbolic Process
1. The map and territory---draw the child a map to school
symbolic = displacement--displacement--producing a complicated act when the "real" stimulus is not physically present
three levels of symbolic processes
1. map is representation of an environment, guiding behavior transforming space into known space
2. or we can map a space by creating a song or poem---first you turn left, then you turn right....
3. or dancing a ritual. 2. productive--capable of producing an infinite number of representations on the basis of a finite number of symbolic elements.
3. Constitutes nature--concept made manageable by reduction of information--but more than one way to draw a map, so maps not only constitute activity of mapmaking, but also constitute nature itself
4. nature of thought--thought is essentially private vs. thought is predominantly public and social, depends on publicly available stock of symbols, AND thinking consists of building maps of environments.
The map becomes representation of reality but also shapes our experiences of reality; we not only produce but must maintain reality--reality has to be repaired.
To study communication is to examine the actual social process wherein significant symbolic forms are created, apprehended, and used. We understand communication insofar as we are able to build models or representations of the process. But our models, like all models, have dual aspect of and for. of tells us what the process is, for produce the behavior they have described. Models are templates that describe. Our models create what they pretend merely to describe. They give us a way to rebuild a model of and for communication of some restorative value in the shaping our common culture.

TRANSMISSION View of Communication--idea of communication as the transmission of signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control; characterized by the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.
* most common view in industrial culture
* metaphor of geography or transportation
* defined by terms such as "imparting," "sending," "transmitting," "giving information to others" --ex: traditional classroom
* originated in religion, age of exploration and discovery (e.g., manifest destiny; moral meaning of transport is extension of god's kingdom
Communication is a process whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people.
RITUAL View of Communication--projection of community ideals and their embodiment in material form--dance, plays, architecture, news stories, strings of speech--to create a symbolic order that provides information, but also confirms, represents underlying order of things, and manifests ongoing and fragile social processes.
* generally dismissed in American thought
a. Puritan individualism
b. we devalue process in favor of product
c. we isolate science from culture--science provides culture-free truth whereas culture provides ethnocentric error. * linked to terms such as "sharing," "participation," "association," "fellowship," "possession of common faith," "communion," and "community."
* not directed toward extension of messages in space but toward maintenance of society in time
* not imparting information but representation of shared beliefs
* sacred ceremony draws persons together in fellowship and commonality.
* downplays role of sermon and highlights role of prayer.
Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.

-------3. Reconceiving 'Mass' and 'Media'
-------4. Overcoming resistance to Cultural Studies

CZITROM: "A deep dissatisfaction with the philosophical assumptions and aims of the dominant discourse in American communication (681) studies pushes Carey to make a penetrating critique of its limits. Since the 1930s that tradition has been grounded in the transmission view of communication as a process fundamentally dedicated to control, persuasion, and power. Relying upon models of human action derived primarily from behavioral psychology, information theory, and functional analysis, American studies of communication have privileged the search for laws, predictability, and the action of environment upon relatively passive subjects. They have tried to define "the precise psychological and sociological conditions under which attitudes are changed, formed, or reinforced and behavior stabilized or redirected" (44). The price for this method has been high, too often eliminating the human subject from a discussion of communication "effects. "
Carey's point, however, is not simply to throw out the "effects" tradition. He wants rather to build on it, especially the legacy of two of its founding fathers, Walter Lippmann and Paul Lazarsfeld, both of whom grappled thoughtfully with the crucial issues of how mass communication has transformed American politics and culture. His plea is for a reorientation to a "cultural studies approach," one that insists (and here the echo of Dewey is clear) that communication "is a form of action-or, better, interaction that not merely represents or describes, but actually molds or constitutes the world" (84). Cultural studies of communication concentrate on the hermeneutic issues of meaning and interpretation, in contrast to the search for laws and functions. They seek to illuminate the human activity of communication the complex practices, conventions, and expressive forms that are empirically observable in time and space. "

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
--------5. "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,"with John J. Quirk,
David Silver says: "This essay serves as a useful grounding device for even the most enthusiastic technophile. Carey traces the historical presence of what he calls a "futurist ethos," an American phenomenon which "identifies electricity and electrical power, electronics and cybernetics, computers and information with a new birth of community, decentralization, ecological balance, and social harmony" (114). In this light, the notion of the technological sublime translates into false consciousness (a process which incidentally weds two Marxs -- Leo and Karl)."

Czitrom (referring to both essays written with Quick): "effectively deconstruct what, following Leo Marx, Carey calls "the rhetoric of the electrical sublime" (123). With the American public being bombarded by corporate, popular, and political paeans to the latest technological "revolutions" fibre optics, smaller and more powerful computers, satellite-based communications systems -the staying power and continuing relevance of these essays, first published in 1970, is remarkable. They offer a historically based critique of a persistent strain in American thought: the mythologizing of electrical techniques "as the motive force of desired social change, the key to re-creation of a humane community, the means for returning to a cherished naturalistic bliss" (115). Technology, as Carey argues, is never separate from culture. Rather, it (682) is "thoroughly cultural from the outset: an expression and creation of the very outlooks and aspirations we pretend it merely demonstrates" (9). By contrasting the celebratory rhetoric surrounding such enterprises as the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and the Tennessee Valley Authority with their more ambiguous histories, Carey exposes "the folly of identifying technical projects with the creation of democratic community" (132). Readers may smirk at the silliness (and sales?) of John Naisbitt's Megatrends or Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, but these books proffer merely popular manifestations of views shared by powerful sectors of American society: multinational corporations specializing in communications, the military, the State Department, and leading research universities. Carey insists that intellectuals bear a special responsibility to challenge what Lewis Mumford called "The Myth of the Machine." If they do not, they risk complicity with the myth-makers. It is more urgent than ever, Carey maintains, that we get on with the steady, hard work of scholarship and politics "in a language of democracy that is demythologized and in which political words are again joined to political objects and processes" (14041). Carey's model and his most important influence in this respect is the Canadian economist and historian Harold Innis. His tribute to Innis, "Space, Time, and Communications," demonstrates the continuing vitality of some of that difficult and neglected thinker's central ideas: the conflict between space-biased and time-biased media of communication; the link between a revived oral tradition and a vital public life; the paradoxical nature of changes in communications technology; the disastrous political and social consequences attending monopolies of knowledge. "

--------6. Space, Time, and Communications: A Tribute to Harold Innis
--------7. The History of the Future, with John J. Quick
--------8. Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph
Czitrom: "Artfully fuses his theoretical views with concrete historical analysis. In Carey's opinion, the telegraph stands metaphorically for all the innovations in modern communication. It not only allowed the first effective separation of communication from transportation, it also ushered in, through railroad signaling, the use of communication to control physical processes. The telegraph changed the basic ways in which Americans thought about communication (providing the basis for the transmission model) and profoundly altered the American press, commerce, and notions of space and time. Carey shows how, by diminishing space for purposes of trade, the telegraph transformed the nature of the market, shifting speculation from arbitrage to futures, from trading commodities between places to trading them between times. Because the telegraph could send messages faster than railroad (683) cars could move goods, it also brought about the adoption of standard time zones by 1883, crucial for the coordination of government and industry. In prefiguring the modem computer, the telegraph "constructed a simulacrum of complex systems, provided an analogue model of the railroad and a digital model of language. It coordinated and controlled activity in space, often behind the backs of those subject to it" (229). The common sense view holds that modem media "have drastically altered the ordinary terms of experience and consciousness, the ordinary structures of interest and feeling" (1-2). Yet, the stories we tell ourselves about technologies, "the talk of a communications revolution and exalted hopes and equally exaggerated fears of the media, are repetitions so predictable as to suggest undeviating corridors of thought" (2). Carey is not afraid of the contradictions in communications technology or the deep ambiguities in American culture; indeed, he chooses, as he says, to exploit these as a resource for opening up our thinking. "