JOSHUA MEYROWITZ

Joshua Meyrowitz

Joshua Meyrowitz

Media have the ability to free people from temporal and spatial attachments and present a seemingly paradoxical possibility: to be in two places at once. According to Joshua Meyrowitz, the downside of this is that the sense of place is thereby negatively affected (Buchanan Boddy 1983). Time, space and place are some of the most used and misused terms in media and communications, and they have been defined differently and from different theoretical perspectives, constituting rather nebulous keywords in the field. In outlining the conceptual framework of these terms, time is defined as natural time…abstract time … or experiential (phenomenological) time, with the latter being conceived as my time: time as experienced by me-or-anyone, my own here-and-now, my situated being-in-the-world, me as a real someone someplace sometime now.

Space, in turn, is amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analysed. In relation to the often intermingled concept of place, there is nearly always some associated sense or concept of place in a way that it seems that space provides the context for places but derives its meaning from particular places. In this sense, place is a concretion of value … it is an object in which one can dwell, whilst space … is given by the ability to move. (Kling Iacono 1984 pp 77-96)

Meyrowitz(1997 pp.112) asserts that media have destroyed the traditional relationship between the physical and social realms, and consequently, people no longer know 'their place in the world.' In fact, he asserts, they no longer have a 'place' in the traditional sense - a place where one knows with certainty how one should act. In other words: people no longer have a sense of place because they have lost some of those behaviour patterns which previously provided an orientation in that place.

Meanwhile electronic media are not only weakening the physical place as a determinant for social situations. They can, at least in one regard, as Meyrowitz (1997 pp.112) emphasises; strengthen the connection between the messages and the physical place to the point that they offer particular contexts for medial messages. The result: the electronic media 'play' with the place in an unusual way. They breach its borders and change its meaning yet they also use the place as a backdrop. This applies to mass media and television in particular. The peculiarity of interpersonal communications media is that the people are not exactly in two places at once nor do they meet in one place or the other. More accurately, they meet 'in between' - in the 'non-place' of cyberspace - so that one place or the other, the locations of the sender and receiver, will recede at least virtual. This also applies quite accurately in the case of telephone communication. It is not only that a telephone conversation absorbs the attention from the here and now of the real physical location of communication.

True, influences in the immediate environment can be disagreeable disturbances therefore it is possible to ...