KeyWords: Transportation View of Media

Key Words
Transportation or Transmission View of Communication

Transportation or Transmission View of Communication

James Carey, Dean Emeritus at the University of Illinois, has written extensively on what he sees as the two basic models or views of communication and media. In his collection of essays, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), Carey distinguishes between a transportation or transmission model of communication and a ritual model:

"Transportation, particularly when it brought the Christian community of Europe into contact with the heathen community of the Americas, was seen as a form of communication with profoundly religious implications. This movement in space was an attempt to establish and extend the kingdom of God, to create the conditions under which godly understanding might be realized, to produce a heavenly though still terrestrial city.

"The moral meaning of transportation, then, was the establishment and extension of God's kingdom on earth ... [The telegraph] entered American discussions not as a mundane fact but as divinely inspired for the purposes of spreading the Christian message farther and faster, eclipsing time and transcending space, saving the heathen, bringing closer and making more probable the day of salvation...

"Communication was viewed as a process and a technology that would, sometimes for religious purposes, spread, transmit, and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and information farther and faster with the goal of controlling space and people" (Carey 1989, 16-17).

In contrast to this notion of control, a ritual model views the process of communication as a one of sharing:

"A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs ... the archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality" (Carey 1989, 18).

In a ritual model of communication, human agency via social structure is granted at least equal -- if not superior -- emphasis and influence in the process of opinion formation, in the social construction of reality, and in the maintenance of social continuity.