Communication as Culture

200 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion. David K. Vaughan explores the automobile in Americanjuvenile series fiction from 1900 to 1940 and finds a sense of adventure and discovery of the landscape that mirrored automobile touring. James E. Paster looks for evidence of typology and symbolism in snapshots of middle-class Americans and their automobiles. Part 3, “Building Types,” contains former SCA president Jan Jennings’s groundbreaking study of practical and aesthetic aspects of home garages. There are also excellent essays about motel design and prefabricated metal garages, cafes, and gasoline stations. Part 4, “Road and Street,” best exemplifies the SCA’s combined geographic and architectural approach. Richard Ingersoll cites Hous­ ton as a case study of early traffic congestion and the transformation of the street from a domestic adjunct to a conduit for automobiles. R. Stephen Sennott looks at Chicago architects and their attempts to create new designs or modify old ones to accommodate automobiles in such diverse structures as automobile clubs, skyscrapers with parking garages, and Union Station, which required an elaborate traffic-circulation plan. Daniel M. Bluestone looks at the dawning awareness of roadside blight in the 1920s and efforts to reform roadside aesthetics. Sara Amy Leach contributes a fine study of parkways in and around Washington, D.C.; this essay is a nice complement to the handful of previously published works about parkways in New York City, Virginia, and elsewhere. Finally, Arthur Krim offers a wide-ranging look at the cartography and cultural sites of U.S. Route 66. Except for a few sour notes, this book is a solidly written, revealing look at some of the by-products of our celebrated love affair with the automobile. It is a prismatic view that attempts to draw a variety of conclusions from the diverse material culture and literature of the roadside. All in all, it is a major stride forward for the SCA. Roger B. White Mr. White is responsible for automotive history at the National Museum of American History. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. By James W. Carey. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Pp. xiii 4- 241 ; bibliography, index. $12.95 (paper). For over two decades, James W. Carey, dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been writing thoughtful and incisive essays on media and society in the United States. In Communication as Culture, he has brought together eight of these essays, several of which have been extensively revised for this publication. Included here are his classic essay on “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” as well as Technology and culture Book Reviews 201 “History of the Future” and “Mythos of the Electronic Revolution” (both coauthored with John J. Quirk). Although Carey’s essays were written over a period of many years, common themes stand out. For Carey, as for Raymond Williams, communication is culture. That is, it involves not merely the trans­ mission of information, but the reenactment of ritual. All too often, Carey insists, the latter is ignored by media scholars intent on analyzing the impact, or “effects,” of a given technology. How a given technology works is studied at the expense of what it means. Instead of trying to understand how communication can take the form of a “sacred ceremony” that maintains society through time, it is reduced to a tool for extending one’s influence over space—or, as Carey aptly observes, to an instrument for pursuing power or fleeing anxiety. This “transmission model” of communications, Carey contends, has proved equally influential among the political elite. Despite the Founding Fathers’ conviction, as good republicans, that the emerging political culture ought to combine the “time-binding power” of oral discourse with the space-conquering potential of the newspaper press—and, although unmentioned by Carey, the postal system as well—public policy consistently sacrificed the former to the latter. Wedded to a “high communications policy,” political elites focused exclusively on spreading messages further in space and on reducing the cost of transmission. As a consequence, American national iden­ tity became, to a degree unprecedented anywhere else in the world, “the product of literacy, cheap paper, rapid and inexpensive trans­ portation, and the mechanical

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