Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1984)

This book was a huge - and very pleasant - surprise for me. I read it in connection with my course (and interest in) Media & Minds. I thought I had read or at least knew of the most important works in the field of media ecology - McLuhan, Ong, Goody, Postman, etc. No Sense of Place had only recently registered in my awareness. So my expectation was that it would, at most, fill in a few new details. Instead, what I found was a book that not only made a new, and very innovative, argument about the impact of television. Much more broadly, I think the book qualifies as a significant contribution to social theory (and it turns out it's been cited more than 8,000 times). Meyrowitz does this by combining Erving Goffman with Marshall McLuhan. Goffman, about whom only the title of his most famous book - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - had given me an inkling of his ideas, turns out to be more complex and interesting than I had realized. His theory is that we are performing on many stages (not just one, as I had thought), while also retreating to a "back stage" for rehearsal of our "front stage" roles and for rest. So it turns out that Goffman's theory is much more about roles than I had suspected, and hence is also relevant to explaining group formation. But Goffman's theory is static, and this is where McLuhan comes in. Meyrowitz argues that new media change informational flows, as with the introduction of TV, thereby changing "situations." These define roles, and so as situations change, so too do the borders between front stage and back stage. Meyrowitz applies this quite persuasively to explain many of the changes in American society since the 1960s, thus offering a worthy alternative to Ronald Inglehart's account, which revolves around the shift from material to post-material values. Just as Postman's Amusing Ourselves made arguments about TV that now also seem remarkably prescient about our digital age, so too do Meyrowitz's arguments regularly seem to anticipate changes we are now living through.