ABSTRACT
In his time, Raymond Williams was an elusive public figure whose attempts to secure a wider media audience for his social diagnoses met with limited success. Perhaps due to the characteristics of his dense, occasionally opaque prose, he never reached the level of popular notoriety of other intellectuals in Britain, such as George Bernard Shaw or Christopher Ricks (see Gorak 1988: 1). In addition, his views on the evolution of the media sharply conflicted with those of a critic who went on to become one of the most revered figures in the study of communications, namely Marshall McLuhan. Yet Williams’ ideas on media causality, determinism and agency have shaped debates around the emergence of new media and their impact on society for many decades, whether it be television or, more recently, the Internet. Today, thirty-five years after Williams challenged his readers to reconsider those factors which shape the future of the media, the terms of the debate remain as he identified them. This chapter relates Raymond Williams’ writing on communications
technology with his reflections on the nature of tragedy to achieve a better understanding of his significance for contemporary architectures of media and communication, such as user-generated online video. Williams emphasized the subordination of technology to the social context of its implementation, which is a determining factor in the uses to which technologies are put. For him, technology hinges on the complex social and political texture of the world from which it emerges, even in the case of those innovations such as the Internet that seem least dependent on their social environment and promise an endless expansion of free, democratic interconnection. A study of contemporary media from the perspective provided by Williams’ theories yields new insight into how technological advances are shaped by the world into which they enter and which they, in turn, help to recast. Williams’ grasp of technology as ‘at once an intention and an effect of a particular social order’ (Williams 1974: 128) sheds light on the rising accessibility of recent innovations such as popular video sharing, especially YouTube, a marketplace of ideas which is becoming the most prominent platform for video online in English-language media.
Specifically, I investigate the transformation of what Williams would term the ‘technique’ of video recording and web-sharing (the application and development of particular skills) and YouTube ‘technology’ per se as ‘the body of knowledge appropriate to the development of such skills and applications and, second, a body of knowledge and conditions for the practical use and application of a range of devices’ (Williams 1981a: 227). This chapter shows a particular interest in web-sharing platforms as a
social institution bound to the concrete historical circumstances of the early twenty-first century, but also in the specific conditions that shape the transformation of an innovation into a full-fledged technology as ‘necessarily in complex and variable connection with other social relations and institutions’ (Williams 1981a: 227). This innovation was demanded by a structure of feeling defined by an impulse towards self-fashioning and authenticity on the one hand, and the impact of a traumatic mass-experience on the other hand, which reached its audience through visual channels – primarily television – and prompted an explosive self-dissemination: YouTube was launched three and a half years after 11 September 2001, or 9/11. The political circumstances which dictated that the attacks consisted not only in physical but also visual violence against the entire world are closely related to the psychological climate that led to the creation of the Internet video-sharing technology. Moreover, traumatized reactions to 11 September reinforce Williams’ view of tragedy as more than an academic questioning of rituals and closer to ordinary human suffering. In keeping with Williams’ conception of how technologies are modified
by prevalent social interests, YouTube has indeed been used and abused by media industries, audiences and communities of interest in ways that challenge conventional understandings of how media platforms are produced and consumed. Further, the format and distribution patterns of online video has been inflected by recent developments in the nature of public spheres and their implicit communications processes towards an acceptance of non-rational, performative aspects of personal and political expression. As Chantal Mouffe and Henry Giroux have argued, a greater focus on the emotional subtext of conflict building and conciliation may prove essential to an understanding of how contemporary media effectively mediate among individual views; in other words, how the proliferation of online video technologies demands an appropriate grassroots commitment to relational rather than rational politics. Williams warned against what Jürgen Habermas called the ‘refeudaliza-
tion’ of the public sphere, which entails the manipulation of debates by powerful interests (Habermas 1991: 231). The idea that the democratic potential of online political debate can be hindered by the encroachment of corporate capital and other power structures on the online community is not new (see also Freedman 2002). Yet little attention has been given so far to the specific potential of a communications channel that is both textual
and visual, instantaneous and repetitive, deliberative and affective, one that exemplifies the type of interpersonal communication that Walter J. Ong termed ‘secondary orality’ (Ong 1982). The shift from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality derived to some extent also from the expansion of interactive visual media as an addition to textual communication, a cultural phenomenon that further enhances what Williams identified as the profoundly social nature of technology.
