ABSTRACT
It is an instructive fact that all of the political positions represented in contemporary cultural theory and media studies agree on the value of ‘conversation’. The Marxist tradition calls for authentic modes of interaction, from Adorno’s complaint that the one-way communication of the culture industry resembles the Führer in its ubiquitous, inescapable commands, or the dream, shared by Brecht and Raymond Williams among many others, of using the mass media as means of interactive public access. Leading sociologists such as Bourdieu, Giddens, and Habermas all favor versions of what Giddens calls dialogical democracy. So do social democrats, such as John Dewey and James Carey, who regard communities without conversation as little better than animal gatherings of intellectually passive creatures. John Stuart Mill and Elihu Katz, yet further toward the liberal mainstream, believe that conversation is a key step in the formation of public opinion in the space between press and parliament. Feminists and postcolonial theorists have long called for encounter and dialogue as contrasts to sexist and racist oppression. Even conservatives sign on: the fallen cyber-prophet George Gilder (1992) bluntly called broadcast television ‘totalitarian’ in its one-way flow of programming and lack of interactivity, celebrating digital television for allowing dialogic creation of content. One could multiply examples denouncing monologue and praising conversation from diverse political and intellectual points on the spectrum; even the Archbishop of Canterbury is not only a fan of The Simpsons but also of conversation as a theological ideal (Williams 1999). We live in the age of conversation. It is one of the unquestioned goods of the moment and a normative ideal of how the media are expected to work in a democracy.
