Presence in Popular Culture
- Sheridan's view of presence earned its first pop culture reference in 1984 with William Gibson’s pre-World Wide Web science fiction novel "Neuromancer", which tells the story of a cyberpunk cowboy of sorts who accesses a virtual world to hack into organizations.
- Joshua Meyrowitz's 1986 "No Sense of Place" discusses the impact of electronic media on social behavior. The novel discusses how social situations are transformed by media. Media, he claims, can change one's 'sense of place,'by mixing traditionally private versus public behaviors - or back-stage and front-stage behaviors, respectively, as coined by Erving Goffman. Meyrowitz suggests that television alone will transform the practice of front-stage and back-stage behaviors, as television would provide increased information to different groups who may physically not have access to specific communities but through media consumption are able to determine a mental place within the program. He references Marshall McLuhan's concept that 'the medium is the message,' and that media provide individuals with access to information. With new and changing media, Meyrowitz says that the patterns of information and shifting accesses to information change social settings, and help do determine a sense of place and behavior. With the logic that behavior is connected to information flow, Meyrowitz states that front- and back-stage behaviors are blurred and may be impossible to untangle.
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Famous quotes containing the words presence in, presence, popular and/or culture:
“The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, and we are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)