Emotional Rescue — Real Life
James W. Carey wrote that our term “communication” has two different historical meanings embedded in it — what he called a “transmission view” and a “ritual view.” The transmission view is the one that dominates — communication means sending information across a distance. The ritual view is largely forgotten, but we can find its traces in words similar to communication such as commonness, communion, and community. Carey explains that the ritual view “is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time.” This is the form of communication that allows individual self-maintaining systems to come together into large and healthy self-maintaining systems. For decades we’ve had the infocentric faith that if we designed media for transmission, the ritual part would come of its own accord, creating an enlightened global village. At the end of this most horrible of years, we may all finally realize it doesn’t work that way. Our challenge now is to design ritual technologies.
James W. Carey wrote that our term “communication” has two different historical meanings embedded in it — what he called a “transmission view” and a “ritual view.” The transmission view is the one that dominates — communication means sending information across a distance. The ritual view is largely forgotten, but we can find its traces in words similar to communication such as commonness, communion, and community. Carey explains that the ritual view “is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time.” This is the form of communication that allows individual self-maintaining systems to come together into large and healthy self-maintaining systems. For decades we’ve had the infocentric faith that if we designed media for transmission, the ritual part would come of its own accord, creating an enlightened global village. At the end of this most horrible of years, we may all finally realize it doesn’t work that way. Our challenge now is to design ritual technologies.