Media, Mobility and Migrancy

We can usefully explore the relationship between patterns of media consumption and patterns of residence by reference to what Raymond Williams called “mobile privatisation”. Williams understood this as a form of activity centred on the home (and to that extent involving a withdrawal into domestic space). However, he stressed that this is not simply a “retreating privatisation … because what it especially confers is an unexampled mobility … It is not living in a cut-off way”. If it does involve living in some kind of shell, “it is a shell which you can take with you, which you can fly with, to places that previous generations could never imagine visiting”. ¹ Thus, like Arnheim, Williams saw the television set as part of the same set of technologies as the motor car – as Moores puts it, technologies “designed to transport the individual or small family group to destinations [physical, symbolic or imaginary] well beyond the confines of home or neighbourhood, combining privacy with mobility”. The experience of domestic television consumption is then one of “simultaneously staying home and imaginatively, at least, going places”. If broadcasting is able to “transport” viewers and listeners to previously distant or unknown sites, mediating between private and public domains, then, as Moores notes, “we need to specify the kind of ‘journeys’ that are made. Who chooses to go where, with whom and why?”, ² asking “to what new destinations is it promising transport”. ³ Without wanting to overstate the contrast between modern and pre-modern periods, it is still possible to accept James Carey's argument that modern technologies, from the telegraph to satellite television, give rise to “communities … not in place, but in space, mobile, connected across vast distances by appropriate symbols, forms and interests”. ⁴ It is in this context that Anthony Giddens argues that while in pre-modern societies space and place largely coincide, by contrast “the advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place, by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction”. ⁵