(To be published in James Carey: A Conversation,
Eve Munson and Catherine Warren, eds. (Minneapolis, Minn.:
University of Minnesota)
Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
by Carolyn Marvin
Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania
How communications technologies structure ways of thinking and
feeling is a lifelong concern of James Carey's work. Along the way, he
has acknowledged a debt to Harold Innis, the economic historian for whom
differences in message transportability among media make all the social
and cultural difference in the world. When Carey began his career as a
media analyst, he entered a field in which the staple devices for
examing media in society were biographies of media figures and histories
of media organizations. Innis's work was different. He offered a
powerful analytic framework that connected changes in the history of
transportation and communications technology to dramatic changes in
social structure. Carey's own distinctive development of these ideas has
deeply influenced the terms of media analysis by scholars in the field.
To explore that thinking, we must understand a little about the
Innisian concepts at its roots. For Innis, media in which the message
does not change much over time are time-binding. They are preservers of
culture, and their mode is memory. Such media are exemplified in
architecture, stone, and especially religious tradition mediated through
oral communication, the communication of one body directly with another.
The messages of time-binding media are unstable over space. They become
distorted if they travel any distance. Tradition is an excellent example
since the habitual customs and gestures of a community are difficult to
maintain at a distance. Removed from the communities and generations of
believers that have nurtured them, they are easily misinterpreted.
In space-binding media, messages are not distorted much across
distance, but cannot last long. They are extenders of culture, and their
mode is power. Print and broadcast journalism are space-binding media
that combine the easy transportability of paper with rapid electronic
distribution by telephone, video and computer. Contemporary journalism
is time-shortened and ephemeral. Unlike media crafted from messages
painstakingly sedimented across centuries, like the Iliad or the
Odyssey, contemporary media saturate the moment. They fill up every nook
and cranny of public space. Wherever time-binding and space-binding
technologies flourish together, powerful political states emerge, long-
lasting and broadly extended across territory. The maintenance of
political units as small as tribes and as large as empires depend on
media.
Back to Home Page