Joshua Meyrowitz
Joshua Meyrowitz is a professor of communication at the department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has published works regarding the effects of mass media, including No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, an analysis of the effects various media technologies have caused, particularly television.
Early life and education
''No Sense of Place''
In No Sense of Place, which won the 1986 "Best Book on Electronic Media" Award of the National Association of Broadcasters and the Broadcast Education Association, Meyrowitz uses the example of the television to describe how communication technologies have shaped and influenced the social relations we encounter on a daily basis, proposing that television has been responsible for a significant cultural shift towards new and egalitarian social interactions. He argues that television is a "secret exposing" machine that allows individuals to watch others in an unprecedented fashion. According to Meyrowitz, new media like television have removed barriers and increased access to previously restricted information is responsible for the shift in cultural and social barriers between children and adults, men and women, and even humanizing and demystifying the powerful. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation also entitled No Sense of Place, which was completed in 1978 in the Media Ecology doctoral program at New York University; Christine Nystrom was Meyrowitz's thesis adviser, and the other members of his dissertation committee were Henry Perkinson and Neil Postman. In 1982, Postman published The Disappearance of Childhood, which discussed themes similar to one of the case studies in Meyrowitz's dissertation.Meyrowitz draws upon Erving Goffman's work on social life, in the form of face-to-face interactions, as a kind of multi-stage drama and Marshall McLuhan's work on changes in media of communication. It has been suggested that Meyrowitz was either the first person to combine these theories for analysis, or he was the first to do so in a meaningful way.
Meyrowitz posits his initial theory, that modern electronic media have broken barriers that established concepts of place. He presents this view throughout the book, examining how it relates to different aspects of social and cultural construction.
The book's central contention is that new media like television have removed barriers in a manner unseen with media like print publications, radio, telephone, cinema, and other forms of mass media that predate television. Meyrowitz argues that it is the ease of use, ubiquity or nearly universal access to this information, and the blurring of front-stage and back-stage behavior that removes previous barriers of information. Meyrowitz uses the example of relative access to books contrasted to access to television content. Further, he argues that books require a greater degree of literacy and varying levels of literacy and comprehension than does television. Examples offered include a parent's ability to restrict a child's access to particular types of literature contrasted with a child's easy access to various types of content on television, cultural barriers like guilds and professions that exclude non-members from access to specialized information, and the blending of traditionally private environments into public environments as in the case of televised Presidential cabinet meetings. Likewise, Meyrowitz observes that televisions shows, through storytelling, can reveal secrets about authority figures and institutions. Thus, positions once revered may lose their mystique and become viewed as commonplace.
Reviews and criticism
The book has been described as being "one of the most insightful books" regarding mass media and as having "staying power" and usefulness as a theory. The heuristic value and "staying power" of the book are attributed to the fact that the book examines the subject from a broad perspective, making it a readily adaptable resource and broadly applicable. Moreover, it is written in a style that can be read and understood by readers both inside and outside of academia.However, "No Sense of Place" is also criticized as proposing modern media communication as the singular cause of change, making causal connections between the media and social and cultural changes without exploring other possible factors or influences. Lindlof also argues that some of the changes that Meyrowitz describes, e.g., the emergence of a middle stage from the perspective of media and the audience, may not be permanent and that adaptations to use of the media and its interpretations may evolve. This view of technology and the way users of technology may adapt its use and meaning is akin to Social Construction of Technology theory and the Dual Capacity model of communication. Social Construction of Technology theory argues that use of media is influenced by an agent's attitudes and behaviors, their expertise of the medium, and external influences on the agents/users of the medium. In part, the Dual Capacity model of communication argues that the communication capabilities of the users, in conjunction with the user's understanding of task contingencies and normative contingencies will influence choice of medium for communication.
Others have used "No Sense of Place" to support the notion that one's sense of place or location is "disembedded from local context"; thus, it is less defined by physical space than by the "electronic landscape" of media. These newer electronic media promote the establishment of group identity by "undermining the relationship between the physical location and information access." This is seen as especially true of mobile media, which allow for the medium to travel with the user, as well as creating the ability to be connected to more than one place at the same time.