Joshua Meyrowitz

Joshua Meyrowitz (born 1949) is a professor of communication at the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has published works regarding the effects of mass media, including No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, an analysis of the effects various media technologies have caused, particularly television.

Early life and education

Meyrowitz attended Queens College, CUNY from which he received a bachelor's degree in mass communication/drama in February 1972 and a master's degree in communication theory and media in June 1974. The topic of his thesis was "Relationship of interpersonal speaking distances to TV shot structure". He also attended New York University in the Media Ecology Program from which he received his PhD in media theory in February 1979. the topic of his dissertation was "Media evolution and changes in gender, age, and authority roles".

No Sense of Place In No Sense of Place, which won the 1986 "Best Book on Electronic Media" Award of the National Association of Broadcasters and the Broadcast Education Association, Meyrowitz uses the example of the television to describe how communication technologies have shaped and influenced the social relations we encounter on a daily basis, proposing that television has been responsible for a significant cultural shift towards new and egalitarian social interactions. He argues that television is a "secret exposing" machine that allows individuals to watch others in an unprecedented fashion. According to Meyrowitz, new media like television have removed barriers and increased access to previously restricted information is responsible for the shift in cultural and social barriers between children and adults, men and women, and even humanizing and demystifying the powerful. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation also entitled No Sense of Place, which was completed in 1978 in the Media Ecology doctoral program at New York University; Christine Nystrom was Meyrowitz's thesis adviser, and the other members of his dissertation committee were Henry Perkinson and Neil Postman. In 1982, Postman published The Disappearance of Childhood, which discussed themes similar to one of the case studies in Meyrowitz's dissertation.

Meyrowitz draws upon Erving Goffman's work on social life, in the form of face-to-face interactions, as a kind of multi-stage drama (primarily from Goffman's work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) and Marshall McLuhan's work on changes in media of communication (primarily from McLuhan's works The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man). It has been suggested that Meyrowitz was either the first person to combine these theories for analysis, or he was the first to do so in a meaningful way.

Meyrowitz posits his initial theory, that modern electronic media (in this case, primarily in the form of television) have broken barriers that established concepts of place (i.e., cultural understanding of roles, locations, hierarchies, and more). He presents this view throughout the book, examining how it relates to different aspects of social and cultural construction (including the public versus private spheres of life, group identity, authority and hierarchy, etiquette, gender identity and gender roles, and childhood and adulthood).

The book's central contention is that new media like television have removed barriers in a manner unseen with media like print publications (including books and newspapers), radio, telephone, cinema, and other forms of mass media that predate television. Meyrowitz argues that it is the ease of use, ubiquity or nearly universal access to this information, and the blurring of front-stage and back-stage behavior that removes previous barriers of information (p. 53). The heuristic value and "staying power" of the book are attributed to the fact that the book examines the subject from a broad perspective, making it a readily adaptable resource and broadly applicable. Moreover, it is written in a style that can be read and understood by readers both inside and outside of academia. thus, it is less defined by physical space than by the "electronic landscape" of media. These newer electronic media promote the establishment of group identity by "undermining the relationship between the physical location and information access." This is seen as especially true of mobile media (e.g., mobile phones), which allow for the medium to travel with the user, as well as creating the ability to be connected to (or "present" in) more than one place at the same time.

Articles and journal publications

"Mediating Communication: What Happens?" In the article "Mediating Communication: What Happens?", Meyrowitz explores television as providing a new form of human experience, one which distorts traditional social distinctions by discussing ideas of changed childhood, blended genders, and demystified leaders.

Changed childhood According to Meyrowitz, television is the "secret-exposing machine", letting children in on the "biggest secret of all, 'the secret of secrecy'". Children become exposed to a variety of images and information, which "dilutes the innocence of childhood and the authority of the adults".

"The Rise of Glocality: New Senses of Place and Identity in the Global Village" In "The Rise of Glocality" (2004), Meyrowitz proposes that "all experience is local"; that is, all physical experiences are proximal to our physical bodies. Despite the sophistication of technology - allowing us to communicate and experience people and places far from us and multi-task, we still engage this technology (thus, have the experience) in the time and place in which we are physically located. "The localness of experience is a constant." However, he argues that we do not necessarily construct our concepts or understanding of events (local or distant) from a uniquely local perspective. Different media allow us to incorporate "external perspectives" with which to understand and relate to the local and the distant.

Meyrowitz points out that the sociologists Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead furthered the concept that one's concept of the self is not defined solely by our corporeal properties, but that it is a "reflected concept." As social agents, we construct our understanding of the world and our surroundings through this lens of social meaning. Using Mead's concept of "the generalized other" and "significant others", he applies this to our use of media to construct concepts of place and meaning.

He proposes two ways in which this concept of self relates to media and place. Media have expanded our range of experience. We have social connections with people who are not proximal to ourselves. Likewise, while becoming more engaged with others distant to ourselves, we may become less engaged with the people in the places where we live. Additionally, media expand our concept of a "generalized elsewhere." This generalized elsewhere allows us to construct a broader understanding of the world, where our immediate community is not the only lens that serves us the construction of this concept. Our locality is no longer necessarily the center of our constructed world or the sole source for our experiences in the world. Meyrowitz suggests that this is of greater consequence today than ever before, because of modern media. These modern media help us to establish a much broader concept of the social arena - enhancing our connections to distant people and places and potentially weakening our local relationships, and establishing our locality as a mere "backdrop" for our experiences. Thus, we may live in a place without truly integrating into it. Further, he argues, the pervasive nature of modern media (e.g., mobile phones, computers and tablets, etc.) make it difficult to restrict our experiences to the local only. Effort is required to establish restricted boundaries around our experiences. Because of this, our definitions of a situation are varied and unstable, as our boundaries are permeable and ever changing.