No Sense of Place: Joshua Meyrowitz

Joshua Meyrowitz opens his book, No Sense of Place, with an account from his college years. After a three month tour of Europe he comes home to tell of his adventures to family, friends, professors and acquaintances. Through this he realizes that not only does he give a different account of the events that took place, he also delivers the messages in various ways depending on his audience. Relating this to Erving Goffman’s take on social life as “a multi-staged drama in which we each perform different roles in different social arenas, depending on the nature of the situation, our particular role in it, and the makeup of the audience”, he finds it being acted out in his own life. Meyrowitz puts it nicely when he says, “He made me aware of things I knew, but did not know I knew.”

Also studying Marshall Mcluhan, Meyrowitz becomes involved with media communication and many of its facets. Both theorist provided Meyrowitz with clues to understanding social behavior but they didn’t provide exactly what he was looking for, hence we have the book at hand. In the particular chapter that we are looking at for class, Media and Behavior, the first section in part one, Media as Change Mechanisms, sheds light on the fact that most early research geared towards electronic media is primarily focused on message content and not the medium in which it is delivered. In order to address this lack of attention to media as environments in and of themselves, as well as their affects on social life, Meyrowitz uses the rest of the chapter to discuss the following theories: (1) “medium theory” – the historical and cross-cultural study of the different cultural environments created by different media of communication, and (2) “situationism” – the exploration of the ways in which social behavior is shaped by and in “social situations” (Meyrowitz 1986).

It is surprising to me that the media in which messages are delivered have been overlooked for so long. I don’t know if it seems salient because I am in the here and now or if people have been so wrapped up in the message itself that they forgot to consider the medium. Maybe I’m being a little harsh but part of me wonders if it was just easier to shrug off the medium because it adds so many variables. Not to say this was intentional by any means, I am just mentioning it because consideration of the medium in addition to the message makes everything a whole lot messier. Take biases for example. Biases alone contribute a whole host of possibilities for how each individual relates to a message intellectually, emotionally, metaphysically and the list goes on. What is even more absurd is why media messages were studied in the first place. The focus on media messages grew out of early concerns that propaganda transmitted through the mass press or over radio could have a nearly universal effect on different people and could lead to a mass or mob reaction (Meyrowitz 1986). It is not the latter that concerns me; it is the idea that a message could have a universal effect. It just seems that many things have been overlooked here. What I have to keep in mind, though, is that things don’t just happened out of nowhere; they have to develop and grow over time in order to produce something fruitful. This is exactly what has happened here.

The “effects model” was quickly loosing supporters due to its limited knowledge. An alternative approach was that of “uses and gratifications”. The “effects model” is exactly what it says and attributes the influence from the media onto the individual receiving the message. The “uses and gratifications” model attributes choice to the individual to determine what message best fulfills their needs and therefore the individual is influencing the media, not the other way around. Both of these models were lacking insight into the characteristics of the chosen media. This is where “medium theory” and “situationism” come into play.

It is important to note that the singular “medium” is used here because this theory looks at each medium’s characteristics individually as opposed to many other media theories. It makes sense that Mcluhan deems media as extensions of our senses because they cater to exactly that. Different media target different senses and as Mcluhan says, “interplay of the senses shapes forms of thinking and communication.” It is for this very reason that this (i.e. media ecology, our video and the like) is all so important to not only our class but to the general population. It is difficult to relay this, though, due to the extensive background knowledge and theoretical constructs necessary to truly grasp what we are getting at here. I hope that our class is able to take all of this knowledge and wrap it up in a “nice neat” little video (hahaahaha, yea right!) and shed light on the importance of understanding social connections and how this understanding helps us to see ourselves in a new light.

As the medium theorists have suggested, changes in communication patterns are a huge contributor to social change. The mere fact that this has been overlooked up until 1986 and probably well after lets us know that what we, as the digital ethnography class, are getting into is something that holds relevance, now more than ever, because of the continuous expansion of social communication media. Medium theory has one major constraint; it is more of a perspective than a solid theory (Meyrowitz 1986).

“Situationism” is the second topic in this chapter and it stresses the importance of taking things in context. Meyrowitz describes it nicely, “Each defined situation has specific rules and roles. Each situational definition also prescribes and proscribes different roles for the different participants.” The internet has thrown a huge stick into the media spokes, so to speak, because it allows for multiple contexts to exist “at once”, not only that, but it allows users to embrace multiple identities depending on their individual choices. In this way, the electronic age is shifting our situational definitions so that we have multiple avenues to meander down in order to find what we are looking for.

The big picture? What we are dealing with here is a lack of awareness. An awareness for situational contexts and how they affect communication as well as an awareness of what “the medium is the message,” as Mcluhan so eloquently put it, is saying to us. This calls for some major connections made on our [digital ethnography class] part in order to produce something that is accurate, relevant and engaging!