Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2006

The author reflects on his father’s life and contribution as an influential scholar and teacher. He offers some themes of his work, the things that struck his family as characteristic of Jim Carey’s intellectual and ethical positions.

This article asks the questions: are the desires for globalization, democracy, and open communication mutually supportive, or are they contradictory? Can we get all three at the same time or does one of the triad have to be sacrificed to the other? The author suggests that there is an inherent contradiction between globalization of movement, communication, and markets and the nation-state; essentially, the contradiction is one between nation-states, globalization, and democracy. The globe is not as yet and perhaps cannot be the site of democratic forms of governance. In the aftermath of September 11, the dream of nonspatial communities where we could live in friendly comity turned out to be an illusion, for the Internet gave rise to communities, old and new, that were lodged in a new dimension of space beyond control or communication. Applying an historical approach to an analysis of the relationship between nation states, communication, and globalization, the author concludes that we are in some ways back where we started, trying to figure out how to live freely, democratically and globally while avoiding the carnage and repression that made, for all the achievements, the 20th century such an ambiguous period in human affairs.

The very idea of progress, or lack of it, indicates something about the role machines can play in one’s life. Notions about how technology can be used—to improve, subvert, destroy, extend, or interrogate—reveal the interplay of human and machine. What notion of progress might adequately capture the complex interdependence of human and machine in a way that illuminates our current predicament? To ask whether specific events make things better or worse does not reveal what guides our notion of better and worse, what crucial premises, to quote Robert Nisbet (1979), guide our assumptions. In the 21st century, a notion of progress that captures current experience must in some way address randomness, as well as design. We must think again about past and future, about what it might mean to make progress in a world defined by randomness, characterized by uncertainty—a world rich with possibilities and shadowed by dread.

Communication as Culture makes important methodological contributions to media ecology. Carey integrated the insights of Innis and McLuhan with Geertz’s approach to cultural studies, taking into account criticisms of Foundationalism while avoiding postmodern triumphalism. Carey critiqued a transmission view of communication and proposes a “ritual” view, which considers the role of communication in the formation of societies. This view makes a hermeneutical approach appropriate for communication studies, and recognizes the importance of understanding communication technologies as cultural artifacts. Carey’s approach is in line with Postman’s call for media ecology to contribute to the maintenance of society.

During his 40 years of writing about Marshall McLuhan, James Carey’s critical engagement was transformed from initial admiration, to rejection, and then to acceptance. Carey’s dismissal of McLuhan as a technological determinist whose work was inferior to Harold Innis was particularly influential. By the late 1990s, however, Carey called this position an unproductive argument that prevented appreciation of McLuhan’s contributions. This reappraisal of McLuhan was omitted from the two anthologies of Carey’s work and appeared in an array of publications that diluted its impact. This article traces contours of Carey’s transformation on McLuhan to argue that Carey’s recognition of his legacy should replace the view that Carey still dismissed him as a technological determinist.

The late James Carey was the dean in both the formal and honorific senses of the word for the study of communications and society. These notes are an attempt to trace the highlights of his career by his former research fellow. There is some attempt to correlate Carey’s transitions from graduate student to junior professor to dean at the University of Illinois U-C to an endowed chair professor at Columbia University with the evolutions in his interests. Carey’s writings concerned the philosophy of communication, economics, media and technology, cultural studies, democratic discourse, and the role of journalism.

James Carey’s approach to media studies was far-ranging and interdisciplinary. His writings demonstrate the influence of several intellectual traditions, including pragmatism, British cultural studies, American studies, and Catholic social thought. Although his earlier work addressed general issues of media systems and culture, Carey later wrote frequently about journalism, in part because of his interest in the problems of public life in democratic societies, in part because journalism illustrated his commitment to media theory as a historically and socially situated cultural practice.

James W. Carey nurtured a community of educators and students. Students came together to participate in learning, first with Jim Carey, but then with fellow students and later generations of students. Just as Carey (1988) noted in “A Cultural Approach to Communication” that the archetype for the ritual view of communication was a sacred ceremony drawing persons together in communality, his teaching inspired a form of fellowship.

Cassidy Margaret. Bookends: The Changing Media Environment of American Classrooms. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004. 335 pp. Cloth $65.00, ISBN 1-57273-492-2, Paper $29.95, ISBN 1-57273-493-0.