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Abstract(s)
This paper suggests that the thought of the North-American critical theorist
James W. Carey provides a relevant perspective on communication and
technology. Having as background American social pragmatism and
progressive thinkers of the beginning of the 20th century (as Dewey, Mead,
Cooley, and Park), Carey built a perspective that brought together the political
economy of Harold A. Innis, the social criticism of David Riesman and Charles
W. Mills and incorporated Marxist topics such as commodification and sociocultural
domination. The main goal of this paper is to explore the connection
established by Carey between modern technological communication and what
he called the “transmissive model”, a model which not only reduces the
symbolic process of communication to instrumentalization and to information
delivery, but also politically converges with capitalism as well as power, control
and expansionist goals. Conceiving communication as a process that creates
symbolic and cultural systems, in which and through which social life takes
place, Carey gives equal emphasis to the incorporation processes of
communication.If symbolic forms and culture are ways of conditioning action,
they are also influenced by technological and economic materializations of
symbolic systems, and by other conditioning structures. In Carey’s view,
communication is never a disembodied force; rather, it is a set of practices in
which co-exist conceptions, techniques and social relations. These practices
configure reality or, alternatively, can refute, transform and celebrate it.
Exhibiting sensitiveness favourable to the historical understanding of
communication, media and information technologies, one of the issues Carey
explored most was the history of the telegraph as an harbinger of the Internet,
of its problems and contradictions. For Carey, Internet was seen as the
contemporary heir of the communications revolution triggered by the prototype
of transmission technologies, namely the telegraph in the 19th century. In the
telegraph Carey saw the prototype of many subsequent commercial empires
based on science and technology, a pioneer model for complex business
management; an example of conflict of interest for the control over patents; an
inducer of changes both in language and in structures of knowledge; and a
promoter of a futurist and utopian thought of information technologies. After a
brief approach to Carey’s communication theory, this paper focuses on his
seminal essay "Technology and ideology. The case of the telegraph", bearing in
mind the prospect of the communication revolution introduced by Internet. We
maintain that this essay has seminal relevance for critically studying the
information society. Our reading of it highlights the reach, as well as the
problems, of an approach which conceives the innovation of the telegraph as a
metaphor for all innovations, announcing the modern stage of history and
determining to this day the major lines of development in modern
communication systems.
Description
Keywords
Carey, James William (1934-2006) Technological communication Communication process
Citation
Subtil, Filipa - James W. Carey as critical theorist of the information age. In SPT2013 18th International Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology: Technology in the Age of Information, Lisboa, ISEG - Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão, 04-06 jul 2013.