Famed Psychic's Head Explodes:
James Carey on the Technology of Journalism
by Carolyn Marvin
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What does it feel like to live in the worlds created by different
forms of media? To answer this question, Carey asks how techniques take
over and re-shape moral models of human society. Techniques become
metaphors that predispose particular ways of thinking. They provide
potent images about how we are connected to one another. What is lost in
our ways of thinking when cultural elements cultivated and patiently re-
worked over time surrender to those that favor speed, novelty, and
expansion as the measure of social connection? How models of the civic
adjust to the built communicative environment is the foundation of
Carey's interest in the practical imagination of contemporary
journalists who see the world is an environment to be mastered through
explanation. Repertoires of explanation are journalistic technologies as
much as the telephones, printing presses, satellites and computers on
which journalists also depend. In the essays reprinted here, Carey's
focus is not on the machines of journalism but on the pseudo-environment
of media explanations that furnish contemporary culture. Technology,
Carey has said, is the creation and expression of human purposes
embodying concrete life. How journalistic conventions structure belief
for a community is a decidedly technological subject, for these
conventions offer a blueprint for the architecture of relations we call
society.
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