James W. Carey — Communication as Culture- Essays on Media and Society

137 published claims from this book.

• America imagined technology could restore an Edenic state by blending nature and industry
• American culture’s forward orientation is the pioneering ethos made into art.
• American media empire expanded power while preserving nominal sovereignty
• Americans believed their nation was exempt from European history’s burdens
• An eastern corridor has monopolized American news and entertainment since 1800
• Before standardization each US state maintained dozens of conflicting local time zones
• Behaviorist communication models turned social scientists into servants of power
• Carey’s special contribution was that both ritual and transmission views are needed.
• Cartesian metaphors valid for small facts fail on big contested ones
• Chronic interest in communication signals a derangement of its models
• Colonial mailboat schedules dictated the rhythm of family correspondence
• Communication constitutes reality rather than merely representing it
• Communication does not report reality but inverts the reported relation to it
• Communication is a symbolic process producing and maintaining reality.
• Communication media bias societies toward either spatial expansion or temporal continuity
• Communication models themselves shape concrete human interaction.
• Communication overload and shallow participation mask genuine community uprooting
• Communication technologies are celebrated for transforming society, not transmitting faster
• Communication technology serves group monopolies of knowledge, not community
• Communication technology shapes culture through interests, symbols, and community
• Communication’s ritual view aims at maintaining society in time, not extending messages in space.
• Control of time enables coordination of activity and social control
• Cultural science should analyze the ordinary communicative products of contemporary life
• Cultural studies aims to understand meanings rather than explain or predict behavior
• Culture is a process of creating and transforming reality, not an environment.
• Dewey’s conflicting definitions of communication caused characteristic errors in his thought
• Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems answered Lippmann’s Public Opinion
• Distant ancient Eastern history clarifies repeated modern trends
• Effects research has stalled into staid reproduction of predictable results
• Electricity’s invisibility fueled idealist religious and philosophical thought
• Electronic communication enabled space exploration by reducing control signal time.
• Electronic communication’s true effect is spatial political competition.
• Electronic media support a powerhouse civilization of wealth and technical perfectionism.
• Electronics’ core meaning is enlarged social scale and centralizing power, not entertainment
• Every communication form carries a spatial or temporal bias
• Exploration and transportation were framed as religious acts of extending God’s kingdom
• Failed predictions merely trigger appeals to yet another new future.
• First Amendment and private reading eroded the public sphere of discussion
• Free press rights replaced speaking rights with the right to be spoken to
• Future literature mobilizes people toward predetermined ends
• Future movements resort to incantations to reassure themselves of their cherished illusions.
• Future-oriented discourse evades present political participation
• Future-oriented discourse masks the loss of a genuine public sphere
• Futurist prophecy can never be falsified by events
• Generous-looking enfranchisement can produce virtual disenfranchisement.
• Historical investigation reveals the false limits of universal communication theory
• Human activity has progressively remade all of reality including nature
• Improved communication technology increases misunderstanding between groups
• Information can simulate and control the objects it moves ahead of.
• Innis’s texts function as things to think with
• Instant communication technology transformed colonial rule into imperial control.
• Instrumentalized communication destroys the possibility of shared truth
• Instrumentalizing communication has destroyed our sense of truth itself
• Intellectual paradigm shifts never fully transcend the positions they overturn
• Intellectuals must admit ideology rather than claim value-free science
• Intellectuals oscillate between neutral discoverer and credentialed priest
• Knowledge is paradigmatic and never exists as bare data
• Knowledge lives in conversation, with science as one valued strand
• Labelling research mass communication biased inquiry toward impact studies
• Local sun-based time produced dozens of conflicting time zones per state
• Manufactured objects channel the user’s possible movements toward ends built into their design.
• Mass media now define the ordinary sense of being alive.
• Mass media research persists in behaviorism despite knowing media are not behavioral inputs
• Mass media resists the theoretical models that work for interpersonal communication
• Mechanical communication growth did not necessarily expand freedom and knowledge
• Modern scientific elites are oracles to the people and servants of ruling classes.
• Modern scientific elites function like ancient astrologers as oracles and servants of power.
• Modern scientists hold the same prophetic authority as ancient astrologers.
• Modern Western history moved from time-bias toward space-bias
• Monopoly over knowledge means controlling the paradigm, not just data
• Morse anticipated the global village concept decades before McLuhan
• News cannot picture reality but only signal that something is happening
• No privileged starting point exists save historically varying human purposes
• Once space filled, time became the new colonial frontier
• Oral culture distributes knowledge more evenly than printed literacy
• Past predictions have foreclosed genuinely open futures
• Popular culture theory requires conceiving persons as fundamentally cultural beings.
• Positive science supplied a model of uncoerced communication supporting democracy
• Pre-modern masses could only be reached through personal relational networks.
• Press freedom replaced citizens’ right to speak with a right to be informed
• Privatization, not the Bill of Rights, caused censorship’s decline
• Public opinion forms only through discussion, not correct representations
• Readers’ letters reveal public opinion forming outside conscious awareness
• Reality is produced through collective work and action
• Reality is scarce because few control the machinery that determines it
• Religious objections to standard time masked anti-railroad populist protest
• Representation metaphors suited to small assertions fail on large debatable ones
• Ritual-view news is drama that invites readers to assume social roles.
• Scholars are united by civility and conversation, not by a common ground
• Scholarship is a civil conversation rather than a contest over truth
• Seemingly neutral mechanical communication introduced a modern political metaphysics
• Situation-level symbolic transactions can influence society’s broader reproduction
• So-called universal scholarship actually reflects imperial national biases
• Social life includes a ritual order beyond power and trade.
• Social science interprets the interpretations that culture makes of life
• Space-binding media create communities dispersed across distance rather than place
• Standard time in the United States is a recent invention from 1883
• Structures of consciousness parallel structures of communication
• Studying culture is fundamentally studying communications
• Technology-based future forecasting functions as ritualistic exorcism
• Texts lacking a master-plan structure appear disorganized to modern readers
• The behavioral transmission view of communication became exhausted and academic by the 1970s
• The Chicago School defined communication as culture-making, not information transfer
• The electrical sublime rhetoric merged contradictory American desires into a unified promise
• The fantasy versus reality split in popular music is arbitrary taste grading.
• The fundamental form of power is defining reality
• The future ideology deflects attention from present conflicts over wealth and technology.
• The future now plays the same rhetorical role the pastoral past once played
• The more present antagonisms intensify, the more the future is invoked as false unity.
• The public sphere collapses when the public becomes a statistical artifact
• The real divide in communication studies is objectivist versus expressivist worldview
• The ritual view of communication maintains society in time through shared beliefs
• The ruling class controls mental production and regulates ruling ideas
• The sabbath was a resistance zone penetrated by Sunday newspapers
• The spectator theory of knowledge denies the public a creative role
• The telegraph became a model for how people conceptualized communication
• The telegraph decisively separated communication from transportation
• The telegraph displaced older languages, interactions, and city-state capitalism
• The telegraph enabled temporal coordination that made standard time zones possible
• The telegraph made geography irrelevant to trade
• The telegraph originated the science-based electrical engineering industry
• The telegraph prefigured the computer’s control of time down to the microsecond
• The telegraph’s arrival was framed in religious millenarian language
• The telegraph’s ideological impact has been only partially studied
• The time-zone grid ignores geography and embodies imperial control
• The transmission view defines communication as sending messages across distance for control
• The transmission view of communication derives from nineteenth-century transport metaphors
• Thought is primarily public and social, not private
• Time-binding cultures value history, ritual symbols, and rooted community
• Treating communication problems as technical faults masks a political choice favoring dominant elites
• True knowledge requires oral dialogue, not mere reading
• Truth serum torture destroys victims’ capacity to distinguish true from false
• Understanding communication means grasping others’ purposes hermeneutically
• Uneven participation in written tradition produces instability and inconsistency
• US communication research began with five figures meeting in Ann Arbor
• What people are coincides with what and how they produce
• Writing and printing first served state administration, not literature