Sociology and technology

5.6 Sociology and technology

Mass communication is the extension of institutionalised public enculturation beyond the limits of other personally mediated interaction. This only becomes possible when technological means are available and social organisations emerge from the mass production and distribution messages. The media of mass communication are organised to select, compose and record symbols and images. Through a continuous flow of public messages, the mass media become the central arms of the social order from which they spring. Mass media policies reflect not only stages of industrial development and general normative order but also types of organisational constraints, which give various priorities to artistic, political and economic considerations, govern overall media operations, affect their relationships with other institutions and shape the public functions of mass communications.

The extension of literacy and the development of democratic processes have broadened the need for information and widened the range of public whose opinions are taken into account. The developments in technology have had a profound effect upon society; the inter-relationship of sociology and technology is of two kinds, one involving study of the social situation, which gives rise to invention and discovery, and the other involving the study of the effects upon man and society of the uses of the inventions and discovery.

Marshall McLuhan 10 has described the drastic effects of the mass media upon society. To McLuhan, it is not just that man is spending time with the media that is important, nor the patterns of messages transmitted; what is significant is the media itself. His analysis begins with the simple premise that there have been three ages of man; the pre-literate or tribal, the Guttenberg or individual, and the present electronic or re-tribalised age. McLuhan’s thesis is this. In the pre-alphabet age, the ear was dominant and hearing was believing. Man lived in acoustic space, the world of tribes, emotions, mystery and communal participation. Later, with the phonetic alphabet, there was a transition from the ear to the eye, and then with Guttenberg and printing the transition was complete, individualism was born, thought was separated from action and man began to comprehend in a linear, connected fashion that shattered the old tribal unity.

Finally, in the nineteenth century, McLuhan suggests, electronic circuitry began to bind the world up in a web of instant awareness. Today, high-speed communications annihilate the time and space of the world, contracting it into a global village in which everyone is involved with everyone else – the

Mass media theory

haves with the have-nots, races of different colours with one another, adults with teenagers, and science, art, industry, politics and religion together. For McLuhan, involvement is the key word in the present age of electronic mass communication. Previously in human history each medium highlighted a particular sensory channel, which set the way that man felt, thought and acted about information. Now the electronic media, particularly television, provide a minimum of information but a maximum of involvement of all the senses simultaneously.

It is for these reasons that McLuhan stresses the concept that the medium is the message. His idea becomes especially plausible and takes on sociological significance when consideration is given to the distinguishing characteristics of the most modern communication media. Television now makes it possible for communicators to convey to mass audiences messages and dramatic content that simulate primary interaction.

A more traditional view than McLuhan’s holds that the agencies of mass communication are merely transmitters that provide the means whereby people may constantly and instantly become aware of and react to situations far beyond their horizons. These are the organisational and technological

developments that, in the words of Edward Sapir 11 , lessen the importance of mere geographical congruity so that parts of the world that are geographically remote may in terms of behaviour actually be closer to one another than adjoining regions that, from the historical standpoint, are supposed to share a body of common understanding. This means a tendency to re-map the world, both sociologically and physiologically.