ABSTRACT
In this paper, I am dealing exclusively with the ‘public’ forms of social communication, more especially with the broadcasting systems (radio and television).
In what sense can we speak of ‘obstacles to communication’ in the broadcasting media? Let us turn the question around: can we conceive of a publicly-organised mass media system in which there were no obstacles to communication? I suggest that, the moment we put the question in this form, we have to admit that the ideal of ‘perfectly transparent communication’ in broadcasting is, for the foreseeable future, an unattainable and impossible ambition. There are many reasons for this. Some have to do with the technical nature of the ‘media’ themselves which mediate public communication.1 Some have to do with the character of the internal and external or ‘framing’ institutions within which public communication is organized.2 Some, indeed, stem from the fact that we are not dealing with static communications systems, with fixed goals, which can be progressively realized along some linear continuum. Broadcasting systems are dynamic structures which breed their own, further, needs and uses even as they satisfy existing ones. So, even if broadcasters could now, technically, reach all the existing audiences they can identify, and transmit perfectly to them whatever information they desire, the very overcoming of present obstacles which such a development would signal would, in its turn, suggest new, further kinds of communication, new potential uses for the technical means, new types of content, and mobilize new, unrealized demands and needs for communication in the audiences. In the British situation it has certainly been the case that, as television has come into unchallenged dominance as the medium of public communications, and as many of the technical limitations of the medium have been ironed out, so new demands have been made on the broadcasting institutions, both from within their own professional ranks, and from the publics they serve, and from their political masters who put them to use within a context of legislation and practice. Each new, significant, development in British television – the growth of television documentary, the development of problem-centred current affairs journalism, the explorations in television satire, etc – has mobilized new, unexpected audiences, which have, in their turn, framed new demands on the broadcasters. In broadcasting, as in other areas of modern production, the satisfaction of existing communications ‘needs’ inevitably leads to the framing of new needs, and ‘this production of new needs is the first historical act’ (as Marx once observed) which initiates an unending dialectic, whose outcome cannot be predicted.
