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Theory, Culture & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276418808592
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John B. Thompson
University of Cambridge

Abstract
In The Media and Modernity, Thompson develops an interactional theory of commu-
nication media that distinguishes between three basic types of interaction: face-to-
face interaction, mediated interaction, and mediated quasi-interaction. In the light of
the digital revolution and the growth of the internet, this paper introduces a fourth
type: mediated online interaction. Drawing on Goffman’s distinction between front
regions and back regions, Thompson shows how mediated quasi-interaction and
mediated online interaction create new opportunities for the leakage of information
and symbolic content from back regions into front regions, with consequences that
can be embarrassing, damaging and, on occasion, hugely disruptive. The growing role
of mediated quasi-interaction and mediated online interaction has reconstituted the
political field so that political life now unfolds in an information environment that is
much more difficult to control, creating a permanently unstable arena in which leaks,
revelations and disclosures are always capable of disrupting the most well-laid plans.

Keywords
communications, interaction, media, visibility, whistleblowers

In The Media and Modernity, I set out to show that the development of
communication media has played a more fundamental role in the shaping
of modern societies than many scholars in the social sciences have
acknowledged (Thompson, 1995). I also set out to develop a social
theory of the media that would do justice to the transformative character
of communication media. In my view, these concerns remain as relevant
today as they were when I wrote The Media and Modernity in the early
1990s, and the theory of the media I developed in that book is a theory
I would stand by today. However, it is undoubtedly the case that the
information and communication environment of our societies has changed
significantly since then. The digital revolution, which was only just begin-
ning to make its presence felt at that point, has developed at a dizzying

Corresponding author: John B. Thompson. Email: jbt1000@cam.ac.uk

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

pace, and the rapid rise and evolution of the internet and of the many
forms of mobile and networked communication have left few areas of our
social and political lives untouched. It is therefore appropriate to revisit
the theory of the media outlined more than 20 years ago in The Media and
Modernity and consider how it might need to be revised and elaborated in
the light of the digital revolution. That is the aim of this paper. Of course,
in a short paper of this kind I can only sketch a line of reflection that will
need to be fleshed out in more detail elsewhere.

The Rise of Mediated Interaction

The intention of The Media and Modernity was to develop a way of
thinking about the media that was deeply social, or sociological, in char-
acter, and that treated the development of communication media as a
fundamental and constitutive part of the formation of modern societies.
In developing this way of thinking I was not advocating a media-centric
approach: on the contrary, I was arguing that communication media are
but one of several important factors shaping the formation of modern
societies, and that communication media themselves can only be properly
understood in sociological terms. I put forward a particular theory of
communication media – what I called an ‘interactional theory’ of the
media. The basic idea of this theory is that if you want to understand
communication media and their impact, you have to analyse them in
relation to the kinds of action and interaction which they make possible
and create. Communication media should not be analysed on their own,
in terms of their intrinsic properties, in the manner of, say, Innis and
McLuhan, but should be analysed in relation to the forms of action and
interaction which the use of communication media brings into being.
So the first question we need to ask about communication media is
this: what is involved in the use of media to communicate and interact
with others? To answer this question, we must begin by rejecting the
intuitively plausible idea that communication media merely transmit
information and symbolic content to individuals whose relations with
one another remain essentially unchanged. We must see instead that
the use of communication media involves the creation of new forms of
action and interaction, new kinds of social relationships and new ways of
relating to others and to oneself. So what kinds of action or interaction
are we talking about here?
In The Media and Modernity, I distinguished between three basic types
of interaction. I still think that was a good theoretical move, but today I
would add a fourth type for reasons I’ll explain below.
The first type of interaction that I distinguished in The Media and
Modernity is what we could call face-to-face interaction. It has three
defining characteristics: it takes place in a context of co-presence, a
common spatial-temporal setting; it is dialogical in character, in the
Thompson 3

sense that it involves, at least potentially, a two-way flow of information

and communication; and it involves a multiplicity of symbolic cues –
gestures and facial expressions as well as words, smells and touch
(at least potentially) and other sounds and visual cues.
The second type of interaction is what I call ‘mediated interaction’ –
the perfect example here is the telephone conversation, though I would
also include letter-writing and a good deal of what we now do with email.
It involves the use of a technical medium of communication which
enables information or symbolic content to be transmitted to individuals
who are remote in space or time or both. So the spatial and temporal
characteristics of mediated interaction are quite different from those of
face-to-face interaction. Mediated interaction is ‘stretched’ across space
and time, in such a way that individuals can interact with one another
even though they don’t share a common spatial-temporal setting.
Mediated interaction is dialogical in character, but it generally involves
a certain narrowing of the range of symbolic cues. You can see that
mediated interaction is structurally different from face-to-face interaction
if you compare a telephone conversation with a conversation face-to-
face. In a face-to-face conversation you use a wide range of symbolic
cues, facial expressions and gestures as well as the spoken word, whereas
in a telephone conversation you have only the spoken word and your
interlocutor must either speak or issue a constant stream of fillers to
reassure you that he or she is still on the line and paying attention –
‘yeah’, ‘uh-huh’, ‘uh-huh’, etc. Without the fillers, the interaction is at
risk of breaking down.
The third type of interaction is what I call ‘mediated quasi-interac-
tion’ – this is the type of interaction created by the kind of media that
were once called ‘mass communication’, like books, newspapers, radio,
TV and so on, though the term ‘mass communication’ is misleading and
best put aside. Like mediated interaction, mediated quasi-interaction also
involves the stretching of social relations across space and time, and it
involves a certain narrowing of the range of symbolic clues. But mediated
quasi-interaction differs from mediated interaction in two key respects:
first, it is monological in character, in the sense that the flow of commu-
nication is largely one-way (hence ‘quasi’-interaction); and second, it is
oriented towards an indefinite range of potential recipients – that is, it is
open-ended, unlike a telephone conversation which is point-to-point, e.g.
oriented to a specific person who is at the other end of the phone line. But
the important part of the argument here is to insist that our engagement
with media like newspapers and TV is a form of interaction: when you
watch television or read a newspaper or a book, you are not just
‘receiving’ or ‘consuming’ a media product: you are entering into a dis-
tinctive kind of social interaction with others who are remote in space
and perhaps also in time.
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

These are the three forms of interaction that I distinguished in The

Media and Modernity, but now, in the light of the digital revolution and
the massive growth of the internet and other forms of networked com-
munication, I would add a fourth type of interaction – what I’ll simply
call ‘mediated online interaction’. What I want to capture with this con-
cept is the new forms of action and interaction that have been brought
into being by the computer-mediated communication that takes place in
online environments. When I say it is ‘computer-mediated communica-
tion’ I don’t mean that it is restricted to desktop or laptop computers – it
is not the device that matters here, it is the form of interaction that is
created by computer-mediated communication. It could take place on a
smartphone or tablet or other mobile device – the smartphone is a com-
puter too, and in some ways even more important for understanding the
new forms of interaction that are brought into being by computer-
mediated communication and their increasingly pervasive presence in
everyday life.
So what are the properties of this new form of interaction? Like other
forms of mediated interaction, it involves the stretching of social rela-
tions across space and time and it involves a certain narrowing of the
range of symbolic clues. But it differs from the other two kinds of
mediated interaction in two key respects: unlike mediated quasi-interac-
tion, it is dialogical in character; and unlike mediated interaction (e.g.
telephone conversations), it is oriented towards a multiplicity of other
recipients – it is many-to-many rather than one-to-one.
Social network sites (SNSs) are the perfect setting for this kind of
mediated online interaction: on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and
other social media platforms, individuals create or continue social rela-
tionships with distant others, some of whom they know from contexts of
face-to-face interaction but many of whom they know only through the
social media site. A distinctive feature of these sites is that they enable
users to make visible not only their profiles but also their social networks,
thus enabling individuals to make connections with a multiplicity of
distant others that would not otherwise be made (boyd and Ellison,
2008). The character of the relationships they form and the interactions
they have with the different ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ they have on
Facebook and similar sites are shaped both by the properties of the
platform they are using – it’s ‘affordances’, to use Gibson’s felicitous
term (Gibson, 1979) – and by the extent to which these relationships
and interactions are tied to this medium (your relationship to someone
known only through Facebook is quite different from your relationship
to someone with whom you also interact face-to-face in the shared
locales of everyday life). In other words, Facebook and other SNSs facili-
tate a distinctive form of social interaction online, creating a constantly
expanding network of social relationships characterized by varying
degrees of familiarity and tenuousness and by the exchange of symbolic
Thompson 5

content in multiple formats and modalities – messages, comments,

photos, videos, news feeds, etc. – that is made available to others with
varying degrees of openness and restrictiveness.
We can therefore specify the four types of interaction and distinguish
between them by using four key characteristics: (1) space-time constitu-
tion, (2) range of symbolic cues, (3) degree of interactivity and (4) action
orientation. Figure 1 summarizes the interactional properties of these
four types of interaction using these characteristics. Face-to-face inter-
action is situated in a context of co-presence and oriented towards co-
present others who share the same spatial-temporal locale; it is dialogical
in character and can use the full range of symbolic cues. Unlike face-to-
face interaction, all three forms of mediated interaction are stretched out
in space and possibly also in time, and all involve a certain narrowing of
the range of symbolic cues; but in other respects they differ from one
another. Both mediated interaction and mediated online interaction are
dialogical in character (at least potentially), whereas mediated quasi-
interaction is monological; and the action orientation of each is different:
mediated interaction is one-to-one, mediated quasi-interaction is one-to-
many and mediated online interaction is many-to-many.
Having distinguished between these four types of interaction, let me
immediately add four important qualifications and clarifications. First, I
don’t want to suggest that this typology is fixed for all time, or that the
lines of demarcation between the different types of interaction are always
clear-cut – they aren’t. Technologies are constantly changing, and as they
change so too do our ways of using technologies to interact and com-
municate with others. Moreover, specific technologies or apps may blur
the boundaries between these types of interaction, enabling individuals to
interact in ways that blend together the characteristics of different types.
Nevertheless, it is helpful in my view to distinguish these different types
because it enables us to see that the use of communication technologies
involves the creation of new forms of action and interaction, and it enables
us to focus our attention on the crucial ways that these forms of action
and interaction differ from one another. The aim here is not to present a
definitive typology but rather to outline a way of thinking about com-
munication media and their connection to forms of action and inter-
action that can be developed and revised as communication
technologies evolve.
The second point is that, in distinguishing these four types of inter-
action, I don’t want to suggest that every actual instance of interaction in
everyday life will reflect one of these types. In the actual contexts of
everyday life, these different types of interaction are often woven together
in complex ways and individuals are constantly moving between them, or
even interacting in several different ways simultaneously – for example,
you may be watching TV and engaging in face-to-face conversation with
a friend or family member at the same time, and while you’re doing that,
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Space-time Range of Degree of Action

Types of constitution symbolic cues interactivity orientation
interaction
Face-to-face context of co- full dialogical co-present
interaction presence others
Mediated stretched out in narrowing dialogical one-to-one
interaction space and time
Mediated stretched out in narrowing monological one-to-many
quasi- space and time
interaction
Mediated online stretched out in narrowing dialogical many-to-many
interaction space and time

Figure 1. Four types of interaction.

your mobile phone might ring and you might start another conversation
that is carried on concurrently. This is, in fact, pretty common: many
individuals now live in media-rich environments – what Madianou and
Miller call ‘polymedia’ (Madianou and Miller, 2012) – where different
communication media exist alongside one another and in relation to one
another, and where individuals switch between these media continuously,
choosing which medium to use depending in part on the kind of inter-
action and interpersonal relationship they want to initiate and sustain
with distant others. A typology of forms of interaction is not intended to
be a description of the actual flow of social life. But one of the merits of a
typology is that it enables you to separate out the different forms of
interaction which are often woven together in the complex flow of day-
to-day life, to analyse their characteristics and to make explicit certain
similarities and differences that might otherwise be difficult to see.
The third point is that, while SNSs provide a perfect setting for
mediated online interaction, this is not the only form of interaction or
communication that takes place on these sites. There is not a one-to-one
correlation between a site or platform, on the one hand, and a form of
interaction, on the other. Most SNSs are multifaceted platforms that
combine different features and apps to enable users to communicate
and interact with others in various ways (Baym, 2015: 18). For example,
SNSs like Facebook commonly have, in addition to the news feed, a
private messaging facility similar to email that allows individuals to
send messages to particular individuals or groups – hence mediated inter-
action and mediated online interaction are facilitated by the same plat-
form and users can move easily between them. Moreover, the news feed
itself, together with the online status indicator and the ‘always on’ char-
acter of online connectivity, can give users a peripheral awareness of
Thompson 7

distant others even when they are not interacting with them (Madianou,
2016). Many SNSs are also commercial organizations that generate rev-
enue by harvesting personal data about users and selling this data to
advertisers who promote products or services by targeting messages at
particular users or sets of users. These messages can appear as banner ads
on a user’s home page or as posts in the news feed and may, in terms of
appearance, be very similar to posts from other members of a network.
Third parties can also create bots that can be plugged into a messaging
app like Facebook Messenger, so that when a user clicks on an ad in their
Facebook news feed or Instagram feed, a ‘conversation’ with the bot will
open in the Messenger app. But in analytical terms, we need to distin-
guish between promotional communication of this kind, even communi-
cation that takes the form of a ‘conversation’ with a bot, and mediated
online interaction with the other participants in a network. Promotional
communication of this kind is ‘interaction’ in a very specific sense: the
user is receiving messages that are targeted at him or her for the purposes
of selling products or achieving some other end. It differs from trad-
itional forms of advertising because it takes place online and because it
is much more narrowly targeted, since the recipients are selected on the
basis of the personal data harvested by the SNS, but in interactional
terms it is very similar to a traditional ad: this is promotional commu-
nication that is governed by a commercial or other logic and shaped by
the aims of third-party organizations who are using networks to pursue
their ends. As a form of interaction, it is entirely different from the dia-
logical interaction between multiple members of a network, even if it
appears on the same platform and is embedded in the same feed where
mediated dialogical interaction is taking place.
The fourth and final point is that the different types of mediated inter-
action, and the communication media with which they are interwoven,
are themselves always embedded in social organizations of various kinds
and, like all social organizations, these organizations are structured in
certain ways. Just as face-to-face interaction always takes place in struc-
tured contexts or ‘fields’, so too mediated interaction is always embedded
in organizations that develop, control and make available under certain
conditions the communication media that enable the mediated inter-
action to take place. Whether these are the telecommunications compa-
nies that provide the facilities and networks for the use of telephones or
the media organizations that produce and transmit radio and TV pro-
grammes or the technology companies that develop and control the plat-
forms that host social media, these organizations are the social
infrastructure that makes possible and supports mediated interaction in
its various forms – without these infrastructures, or something similar to
them, these forms of mediated interaction would not exist. These organ-
izations, and the individuals who own, manage and work for them, have
their own interests, priorities and concerns. They provide the
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

institutional bases for the intensive accumulation of resources – eco-

nomic, symbolic and informational – and for the exercise of power,
including the power to control access to the communication channels
and networks, whether this is in the form of journalists and editors
who decide which stories will appear in the news or in the form of the
terms and conditions to which individuals must adhere in joining a net-
work or posting a message online.
The typology I’ve outlined here is similar in some respects to the three
forms of communication distinguished by Castells in Communication
Power, but it also differs in certain ways (Castells, 2009: 54–5). Castells
distinguishes between what he calls ‘interpersonal communication’, ‘mass
communication’ and ‘mass self-communication’, where by the latter he
means ‘a new form of interactive communication . . . characterized by the
capacity of sending messages from many to many, in real time or chosen
time, and with the possibility of using point-to-point communication,
narrowcasting or broadcasting, depending on the purpose and charac-
teristics of the intended communication practice’ (Castells, 2009: 55).
While Castells’ notion of interpersonal communication corresponds to
what I’m calling face-to-face interaction and his notion of mass commu-
nication corresponds to what I’m calling mediated quasi-interaction, his
notion of mass self-communication merges together two forms of inter-
action that I would wish to distinguish – what I’m calling mediated
interaction and mediated online interaction. The difference between
these two forms of interaction lies not in their dialogical character
(they are both dialogical or interactive, at least potentially) or in the
medium used (they might both involve the use of digital devices like
laptops or mobile phones, though mediated interaction can involve the
use of other media too, including old-fashioned pen-on-paper) but rather
in the action orientation: mediated interaction is oriented towards a spe-
cific other, i.e. it is point-to-point, whereas mediated online interaction is
oriented towards a plurality of distant others, i.e. it is open-ended. On my
account, using email to communicate with a specific other is a form of
mediated interaction – no different, in terms of its basic interactional
properties, from making a phone call or writing a letter and sending it
by post: the latter is much slower, of course, and hence it is stretched out
in time as well as in space, but its interactional properties are the same.
But this is very different in interactional terms from posting a message on
Facebook or a tweet on Twitter or a video on YouTube, where the
message or tweet or video is available for a plurality of others to see,
respond to, comment on, retweet, share, etc.

The Social Organization of Mediated Interaction

Having distinguished these four types of interaction, I now want to
develop this further by analysing the social organization of these different
Thompson 9

types. In order to do this, I am going to borrow Goffman’s helpful dis-

tinction between the ‘front region’ and the ‘back region’ of action
(Goffman, 1969: 109ff). Any action or performance takes place within
a particular interactive framework which involves certain assumptions
and conventions as well as physical and other features – furniture, décor,
‘props’, layout, etc. – that are part of the setting. An individual acting
within this framework will adapt his or her behaviour to it, seeking to
project a self-image which is more-or-less compatible with the framework
and with the impression that the individual wishes to convey. This action
framework, and the features that are accentuated by the individuals
acting within it, comprise what Goffman calls the ‘front region’.
Actions and aspects of the self which are felt to be inappropriate, or
which might discredit the image that the individual is seeking to project,
are suppressed or reserved for ‘back regions’. In back regions individuals
often act in ways that knowingly contradict the images they seek to
project in front regions. They also relax and lower their guard – that
is, they no longer require themselves to monitor their actions and utter-
ances with the same high level of reflexivity generally deployed while
acting in front regions. The back region is typically separated from the
front region in some way, so that an individual moving into a back
region can assume that the back region will be hidden from the front-
region audience. In a restaurant, for example, the front region is the area
where the customers sit and eat, and the back region is the kitchen area;
the regions are often separated by a swinging door so that customers
can’t see what goes on in the back region – here, waiters and waitresses
can laugh and joke among themselves, complain about customers and
make fun of them, knowing that what they say will not be seen or heard
by the customers.
We can use Goffman’s helpful distinction to elaborate the four types of
interaction. In the case of face-to-face interaction, the interaction situ-
ation is quite simple – we can represent it as in Figure 2. There is one
common front region in which individuals interact, and there are various
back regions to which these individuals can retreat if they wish. The
social organization of mediated interaction looks rather different –
Figure 3. Here, the interactive framework is fragmented into two or
more front regions that are separated in space and perhaps also in
time. Each of these front regions has its own back regions, and each
participant in the mediated interaction has to manage the boundary
between the front region in which he or she is situated and the relevant
back regions. In a telephone conversation, for example, an individual
may try to suppress noises arising from the back region, like the com-
ments or laughter of a friend – they could do this by closing a door, or
moving into another room, or calling them back when they’ve isolated
themselves from potential interference from back-region behaviour.
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Back regions Front region Back regions

Primary interactive framework

Figure 2. The social organization of face-to-face interaction.

Back regions Front region Front region Back regions

Primary interactive framework

Figure 3. The social organization of mediated interaction.

Now let’s compare this with mediated quasi-interaction – Figure 4.

Here, there is no common front region; rather, there is a production
context in which there is a front region and back regions, and there is
a plurality of spatially dispersed reception contexts, each of which has its
own front and back region. In the case of television, the front region of
the production context might be the area of a studio which is covered by
the cameras and microphones – for example, the panel of public figures
Thompson 11

P roduct ion Rec epti on

Back regions Front region

Primary
reception
regions

Peripheral
leakage regions

Interactive framework Interactive framework

of production of reception

Figure 4. The social organization of mediated quasi-interaction.

in a current affairs programme like Question Time, as well as the mem-

bers of the audience who are in the studio and may be given the oppor-
tunity to ask questions or make comments from time to time. This front
region will be separated off from back regions like the production control
room, the make-up and changing rooms, the reception area, etc. Other
features of the studio, such as camera crew and teleprompters, are also
aspects of the back region as they are visible only to the individuals
situated in the production context. The members of the panel and of
the studio audience who appear in these front regions of the production
context will be visible to individuals who are situated in dispersed con-
texts of reception – that is, in the many homes, dispersed in space and
time, where the programme is being watched. The individuals in the
studio will try to manage the way they appear and the way they speak,
conscious of the fact that they are being seen and heard not only by the
other individuals in the studio but also by many thousands or even mil-
lions of distant others, and they will try to prevent their back-region
behaviour (or aspects of their back-region behaviour) from appearing
in the front region. But the leakage of back-region behaviour into the
front region can easily occur – this is a constant hazard that stems from
the social organization of mediated quasi-interaction. Often the conse-
quences of such leakage are trivial but sometimes they are not – indeed,
sometimes the consequences can be hugely damaging and disruptive.
Consider an example. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election in
the UK, the then-Labour-leader Gordon Brown was campaigning in
Rochdale, near Manchester in the north of England. During a television
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

interview he was challenged by a pensioner, Gillian Duffy, about

Labour’s plans to cut the deficit; Brown ignored her on that occasion,
but his aides thought it would be a good idea for him to meet her face-to-
face, so they arranged a televised walkabout in the neighbourhood of
Rochdale where Gillian Duffy lived. Brown met her in the street and
nodded courteously as she expressed her concerns about various issues,
including her anxieties about immigrants from Eastern Europe – it was
classic front-region behaviour intended to show that Brown, a politician
not known for his common touch, was listening to ordinary voters. Then
Gordon Brown returned to the seclusion of his chauffeur-driven car and
closed the door: assuming that he was now in a safe back region, he let
down his guard and described Gillian Duffy in unflattering terms. ‘That
was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman’, said
Brown. ‘Whose idea was that? It was just ridiculous.’ ‘What did she say?’
asked an aide. ‘Oh everything’, replied Brown, ‘she was just a sort of
bigoted woman.’ But what Brown didn’t realize is that he was still wear-
ing the microphone on his lapel and it was still on, so his words were
picked up and recorded and then replayed later on radio and television to
millions of listeners and viewers. And it got worse. Shortly after the
incident, Brown went into a BBC studio for a live radio interview and,
without warning, his unflattering remarks about Gillian Duffy were
played back to him in the interview itself. As the scale of the PR disaster
began to dawn on Brown, he buried his head in his hands, unaware that
this interview was also being filmed, and issued a humiliating apology:

Of course I apologize if I have said anything that has been

offensive . . . You’ve got to remember that this was me being helpful
to the broadcasters with my microphone on, rushing into the car
because I had to get to another appointment. They have chosen to
play my private conversation with the person who was in the car
with me. I know these things can happen. I apologize profusely to
the woman concerned.

But the apology was to no avail – the damage had been done. What
Brown had thought was a safe back region – the car with its doors
closed and windows shut – turned out not to have been safe after all.
In his rush to get to another appointment, he had failed to realize that the
microphone was still on his lapel and still on, thereby allowing his back-
region behaviour to be recorded and leaked into the front region with
dire consequences. This very basic interactional error shows how easy it
is for things to go disastrously wrong in the mediated environment of
modern politics.
Leakage of this kind is very common today – indeed, more common
than ever, thanks to the digital revolution. I’ll come back to this in a
minute. But before I do this, let’s look at the social organization of
Thompson 13

Back region

Front region

Back region Front region Front region Back region

Primary interactive framework Front region

Back region

Figure 5. The social organization of mediated online interaction.

mediated online interaction. The social organization of mediated online

interaction could be represented as in Figure 5. Here we have a set of
individuals interacting with one another in their front regions, which are
themselves separated in spatial and perhaps also temporal terms, creating
a form of interaction that is stretched out in space and time. Each front
region has its own back region, and each participant to the interaction
has to manage the boundary between them. The interaction is dialogical
(hence the arrows are pointing in both directions) and each individual is
linked to others in a network involving multiple participants, so each
individual is orienting himself or herself towards multiple others dis-
persed in space and time. Every individual participating in this interactive
situation knows that his or her utterances, expressions and communica-
tive outputs are available to a plurality of distant others, and each knows
that these distant others can also contribute to the interaction by posting
comments or joining the interaction in some other way.
Let’s now return to the phenomenon of leakage. We’ve seen that one
common form of leakage is the seepage of content from the back regions
into the front regions of mediated quasi-interaction, as in the case of
Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ comment, but the phenomenon is
much more widespread than this and is increasingly linked today to
new sets of players who emerge in the networked space of the internet.
One set of players here are bloggers like Matt Drudge and celebrity
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

gossip sites like TMZ that are actively involved in leaking rumours and
stories about celebrities, public figures and others – and we shouldn’t
forget that Matt Drudge played a crucial role in leaking rumours and
stories about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair well before the traditional news
media were willing to report it. But we’ve also seen the emergence of a
new set of players whom we could aptly describe as ‘digital whistle-
blowers’, like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Digital whistleblowers are actors who see the leakage of sensitive infor-
mation into the public domain as part of their ‘mission’ or self-under-
standing – that is, it is part of a political project or set of political beliefs.
Here leakage is not an accidental or unintended slippage that occurs
when the boundaries between back regions and front regions become
porous or blurred; rather, it is the intended outcome of an action seeking
to expose activities that took place secretly, in back regions that were
hidden from view, and the action is animated by a belief that others have
a right to know about these hidden activities. So what we see happening
in cases like Wikileaks’ disclosure of thousands of confidential US dip-
lomatic cables in 2010 and Snowden’s disclosure of thousands of top-
secret NSA documents in 2013 could be represented as in Figure 6.
Online sites like Wikileaks leak information into a public domain
where it is picked up by mainstream news media and disseminated to a
much wider range of recipients through the traditional channels of
mediated quasi-interaction. In the case of digital whistleblowers like
Manning and Snowden, they can leak either to an online site like
Wikileaks, as Manning did, or to mainstream news media, as happened
in the case of Snowden, who reached out to Glenn Greenwald, a jour-
nalist working for The Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-
maker who had a track record of critical work on state surveillance and
strong connections with the mainstream media. The first article based on
the documents disclosed by Snowden was published in The Guardian on 5
June 2013 and quickly picked up by mainstream media across the world.
When the mainstream media pick up and report material leaked in this
way, they also endow it with a kind of legitimacy that it wouldn’t have if
it were just a story on the Drudge Report or a post on a site like Reddit –
in other words, they endow it with a form of symbolic value, to use
Bourdieu’s term, that derives from the accumulated symbolic capital of
the mainstream media organizations, and this greatly increases the poten-
tial symbolic power and disruptive potential of the leak. It gives the leak
a kind of credibility and visibility that it would not have had otherwise.
However, to do justice to this complex information environment as it
is evolving today, we need to elaborate the model. A more accurate
representation of information flows in the kind of mixed online-offline
media environment – or ‘hybrid’ media system, to use Chadwick’s (2013)
term – that we live in today would look like Figure 7. This includes
mainstream media organizations like The Guardian, The New York
Thompson 15

P r oduction Reception
Online sites Mainstream news media

Primary
reception
regions

Peripheral
regions

digital
whistleblowers leakage dissemination

Figure 6. Leakage from online sites (e.g. Wikileaks) and digital whistleblowers (e.g.
Snowden) into the public domain.

Online sites and platforms Networked individuals

Mainstream media organizations

Figure 7. Information flows in a mixed online-offline environment.

Times, the BBC, CNN, etc., online sites like Wikileaks, the Drudge
Report, Reddit, the Huffington Post, etc., and SNSs like Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube, and the flow of information between these
organizations is two-way. The picture is complicated by the fact that
most mainstream media organizations have a substantial online presence
today, so they can’t be treated exclusively as offline organizations – they
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

are themselves mixed or hybrid media organizations; but they are main-
stream in the sense that they have an established presence and they use
traditional media as well as online media. In the online environment,
the recipients of information are also often producers of it in numerous
ways – they are constantly interacting with others on social media sites,
posting comments, responding to the comments of others, and so on. So
the flow of information in the online environment is really two-way
between online sites and platforms and networked individuals, and
indeed in many cases the platforms are the very medium in which
much of the mediated online interaction between networked individuals
takes place, so the interaction is not so much between networked indi-
viduals and platforms but rather between networked individuals via plat-
forms. In the case of mainstream media organizations, the flow of
information between producers and receivers is largely one-way, as the
notion of mediated quasi-interaction suggests, though the opportunities
for recipients to input into mainstream media organizations is now
greater than it was in the past thanks to the fact that many of these
organizations now have a presence online.

The Transformation of Visibility

By distinguishing the new types of action and interaction brought into
being by the use of communication media and analysing their distinctive
characteristics, we are able to gain a fresh perspective on some of the
historical transformations associated with the rise of modern societies.
For most of human history, most forms of social interaction have been
face-to-face. Prior to the early modern period in Europe, and until quite
recently in some other parts of the world, communication and the
exchange of information were, for most people, processes that took
place exclusively within contexts of face-to-face interaction. Traditions
were primarily oral in character and depended for their survival on a
continuous process of renewal, though story-telling and related activities,
in face-to-face interaction. Forms of mediated communication did exist,
of course, but they were largely restricted to political and religious elites
who possessed the necessary skills, such as reading and writing, to use
these media. But with the rise of the printing industry from the 15th
century on, with the expansion of literacy from the 19th century on
and with the development of electronic media in the 19th and 20th cen-
turies, face-to-face interaction was increasingly supplemented by various
forms of mediated interaction, mediated quasi-interaction and mediated
online interaction. Face-to-face interaction remained very important, of
course, but the ‘interaction mix’ of social life changed in fundamental
ways as these three other forms of interaction became increasingly
important and widespread.
Thompson 17

As the interaction mix of social life changed, so too did the ways in
which individuals appear to and before others. In face-to-face inter-
action, the individuals who participate in the interaction are immediately
visible to one another as they share the same spatial-temporal context
and they are all situated in the same front region of interaction. In face-
to-face interaction, visibility is tied to the spatial and temporal properties
of the interaction situation and is reciprocal in character: each partici-
pant is visible to everyone else and all are visible to each. But with the
development of communication media, visibility is freed from the spatial
and temporal properties of the here and now. In the new forms of inter-
action created by the use of communication media, the visibility of indi-
viduals, actions and events is severed from the sharing of a common
locale: one no longer has to be present in the same spatial-temporal
context in order to see the other individual or individuals with whom
one is interacting or to witness an action or event. Just as the interaction
is stretched out in space and time, so too is the field of vision.
But the properties of communication media shape this field of vision in
certain ways. In the case of mediated quasi-interaction, visibility is no
longer reciprocal in character. The medium changes the ‘directionality’ of
vision: the viewers can see the distant others who appear on their TV
screens or in other media but the distant others cannot, in most circum-
stances, see them. Visibility in mediated quasi-interaction is one-way:
some individuals can be seen by many others without themselves being
able to see these others, while these others can see distant individuals
without being seen by them. In the case of mediated online interaction,
the directionality of vision is altered in other ways because many partici-
pants in the interaction may have means at their disposal to make indi-
viduals, actions and events visible to distant others. The simplest and
most effective of these means is the camera in their smartphones: this
gives every individual who has a smartphone the ability to photograph or
video an individual, action or event and make it available, more or less
instantly, to a plurality of distant others. This is not the same as the
reciprocity of vision that is characteristic of face-to-face interaction
because it is not a matter of each participant in the interaction being
visible to all others. But it is not the same as the visibility characteristic
of mediated quasi-interaction either because the directionality is more
complex: many actors in the network can now use the means at their
disposal – e.g. their smartphones – to make individuals, actions and
events visible to a plurality of distant others. Uni-directionality has
been replaced by multi-directionality.
It is difficult to over-estimate the significance of these transformations
in the nature of visibility and the ways that they are reshaping the fields
of social and political life today. Individuals, actions and events are now
visible in ways that they simply were not visible in the past, and anyone
equipped with a smartphone has the capacity to make things visible to
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

hundreds or even millions of others in ways that were not possible before.
Of course, not everyone avails themselves of this capacity, and not every-
one – or every organization – has the same power to make an image or
video visible to others: like all social processes, the capacity to make
visible, and the extent to which something can be made visible or kept
hidden, made available or removed from view, depends on the power and
resources that individuals and organizations have at their disposal. But
these differentials, important though they are, should not blind us to the
fact that the fields of social and political life have been, and are continu-
ing to be, reconstituted by these new forms of interaction and visibility
brought into being by the use of communication media. Let me examine
this further by focusing on the implications of these changes for the ways
in which political power is exercised.

Reconstituting the Political Field

Prior to the development of print and other media, political rulers inter-
acted primarily with other members of the political elite in the relatively
closed circles of the assembly or the court. Their visibility was restricted
to those with whom they interacted face-to-face in these shared locales of
political power. There were occasions when rulers appeared before wider
audiences comprising, among others, some of the subjects over whom
they ruled. These occasions included major public events such as coron-
ations, royal funerals and victory marches. The pomp and ceremony of
such occasions enabled the ruler to maintain some distance from his or
her subjects while enabling them temporarily to see and celebrate the
ruler’s existence in a context of co-presence. But for most individuals
in ancient or medieval societies, the most powerful rulers were rarely if
ever seen.
With the development of print and subsequently electronic media,
however, political rulers were able to interact with the subjects over
whom they ruled and become visible to them in ways that were simply
not possible before. The relation between rulers and subjects was increas-
ingly shaped by the characteristics of mediated quasi-interaction, and the
political field itself was partly reconstituted by these new forms of action
and interaction. The distinctive properties of communication media and
the institutions of which they were part shaped the nature of the relation
between rulers and subjects and both enabled and constrained the ways
in which they were able to interact with one another. On the one hand,
rulers were able to use these new media to reach out to the subjects over
whom they ruled and address them in particular ways, while on the other
hand subjects were now able to see and engage with rulers as never
before, though in ways that were limited by the non-reciprocal character
of mediated quasi-interaction and the narrowing of the range of symbolic
cues. The development of electronic media, of radio and then television,
Thompson 19

greatly increased the range of symbolic cues and made it possible to

compress the temporal delay to close to zero, giving rise to a distinctive
form of despatialized simultaneity: distant others could be rendered vis-
ible in virtually the same time frame, could be heard at the very moment
they spoke and seen at the very moment they acted, even though they did
not share the same spatial locale as the individuals to whom they were
now visible. Radio enabled the oral quality of the human voice to be
encoded and transmitted to a plurality of distant others, while television
enabled both oral and visual cues to be recorded and disseminated. With
the advent of television, therefore, individuals were able to see persons,
actions and events, as well as to hear the spoken word and other sounds,
in a way that was similar in some respects to face-to-face interaction but
crucially different in other respects: it was stretched out in space, non-
reciprocal in character and dependent on a range of technical and insti-
tutional considerations.
Among the institutional considerations was the fact that any commu-
nication medium of this kind was always part of an organization that
involved large concentrations of resources and personnel who had their
own interests and aims. Journalists and other media professionals were
never neutral conveyors but always interested parties who, in both facil-
itating and producing mediated communication, also framed it in certain
ways, drawing on norms and ethical codes specific to the media field and
on priorities specific to their organizations in order to guide their deci-
sions and practices. In conceiving of themselves as media professionals
with their own codes of conduct and their own aims, journalists and
other practitioners played, and continue to play, a significant role in
shaping the ways in which political leaders, actual and aspiring, are
able to appear before others and, more generally, shaping what is com-
municated to whom and what is made visible and what is not. These
organizational players become gatekeepers who shape the flows of com-
munication, the ways that messages and symbolic content are presented
and the visibility or invisibility of actors in the field.
Part of the importance of the growing role of mediated online inter-
action in the political field is that it disrupts the settled roles of these
institutional gatekeepers. The power of the established media organiza-
tions to shape the agenda is disrupted by the emergence of a plethora of
new players who are able to use communication media to interact with
others while bypassing the established channels of mediated quasi-
interaction. Moreover, by enabling any player in the network to commu-
nicate with others, the power of media professionals to shape the
agenda is attenuated. They must now compete with a growing number
of platforms, information sources and actors who are able to communi-
cate to distant others without going through the channels controlled by
established media organizations. This is not to say that the new platforms
that enable individuals to bypass the traditional media channels are not
20 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

themselves gatekeepers – they are. They set the rules that determine who
can participate and under what conditions, they decide what kinds of
communication are permissible and what kinds are not, they moderate –
using both human operators and automated processes – to remove con-
tent deemed to be offensive or violent or inappropriate in some way, they
develop algorithms to anticipate users’ presumed aims and interests
based on their previous practices and preferences and they use this
form of knowledge to shape the news and other content that appears
in users’ news feeds, to make recommendations and to generate advertis-
ing revenue, among other things. These processes work in ways that are
quite different from the gatekeeping activities of established media organ-
izations – they are based on what Tarleton Gillespie calls an ‘algorithmic
logic’ that uses proceduralized choices and accumulated data to auto-
mate a proxy of human judgement or unearth patterns across collected
social traces, as distinct from the kind of editorial logic that involves the
choices of experts who belong to organizations that claim a certain cul-
tural authority (Gillespie, 2014). But they are forms of gatekeeping none-
theless, and they are not peripheral to the activities of platforms but
central to them (Gillespie, 2018). And in some ways they are even
more consequential than the gatekeeping activities of traditional media
organizations because the dominant platforms are so few in number and
have such an enormous scale and reach.
President Donald Trump, by choosing to communicate via Twitter
where he has more than 50 million followers, made a calculated decision
to prioritize mediated online interaction over mediated quasi-interaction
as his preferred mode of interacting with citizens and with his political
base. This enables him to bypass the established media channels, which
he accuses of bias and of peddling fake news, and to say what he wants to
say without the framing and commentary of the traditional media gate-
keepers – albeit within the constraint of 140 (now 280) characters. It also
enables him to insert his messages into Twitter feeds that include tweets
and updates from family and friends, a feature that gives him and his
messages a kind of mediated intimacy that they would not have if they
were being reported by mainstream media channels (Turner, 2018: 148).
The fact that Trump’s language is often crude and overstated, that his
opinions are strongly expressed and his assertions are blunt, is not neces-
sarily a weakness in the medium of Twitter but could, in the eyes of his
supporters, be a strength, as it enables him to come across as an ordinary
human being with real feelings and strong beliefs, rather than as a cal-
culating politician who weighs every word carefully and studiously
avoids any display of emotion. And by choosing to communicate via
Twitter, Trump is able to speak not only to those who actively decide
to follow him on Twitter but to a much wider audience too, as the main-
stream media scrutinize his tweets with fine-tooth combs and comment
Thompson 21

on them frequently, thereby giving Trump a great deal of visibility in the

mainstream media but on terms of his own choosing.
While the emergence of these new forms of interaction and visibility
created by the use of communication media has reconstituted the polit-
ical field and created new opportunities for both political leaders and
ordinary citizens to participate in political life and interact with others,
they have also created new obligations and new risks. New obligations
because political leaders, actual and aspiring, cannot not adapt them-
selves to the new forms of mediated action and interaction that now
partly constitute the political field. They have to adapt their ways of
acting and speaking to fit with these new conditions. They have to give
a great deal of attention to their appearance, their dress, their way of
speaking and relating to others through mediated forms of interaction –
in other words, they have to pay a great deal of attention to what we
could call ‘the management of visibility’. In fact, they really have no
alternative now: this is not just an opportunity, it is an obligation, some-
thing they have to do; it is part of the structure of a field that is partly
constituted by mediated visibility. This also partly explains why, in our
heavily mediated democracies, individuals who have forged careers in the
media – from Reagan to Trump – can move so easily into the political
field: it is not just because they are media celebrities, known for their
well-knownness, as Daniel Boorstin once put it (Boorstin, 1961: 57), but
also because they are well-versed in the arts of mediated visibility. They
know how to present themselves to others through the media and com-
municate effectively with them – for them, the management of visibility
through the media has become second nature. As Fred Turner aptly
observes, Trump mastered the idiom of mediated authenticity as the
host of reality TV’s The Apprentice and then transferred this seamlessly
to Twitter, where his petulance, self-congratulatory pronouncements and
bombastic attacks on others are seen by his supporters as signs of his
authenticity as a person (Turner, 2018: 147). Some commentators lament
the extent to which the entertainment industry has infiltrated politics and
see this as another expression of a culture that has become obsessed with
celebrities, but this overlapping of entertainment and politics is a symp-
tom of a more fundamental structural transformation in which mediated
forms of interaction and visibility have reconstituted the political field.

The New Fragility

These new forms of interaction and visibility create new risks too. Today
leaders are much more visible than political leaders were in the past, and
however much they may try to manage their visibility, they cannot com-
pletely control it. So the visibility created by the media can become the
source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility in the political sphere.
22 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

There are just too many sources of information, and too many ways in
which actions or utterances made in the past, or made in back regions
that were seemingly closed off from the front regions of mediated inter-
action and quasi-interaction, can be captured, preserved, transmitted and
re-transmitted into front regions where they can disrupt, compromise or
undermine the self-images that leaders wish to project.
These forms of disruption, which have existed since the emergence of
print and electronic media, have only been exacerbated by the digital
revolution – and for two interconnected reasons. First, the digital revo-
lution has made it much easier to capture and preserve actions and utter-
ances and to copy and reproduce images and information. Now everyone
with a smartphone in their pocket or their bag is equipped with the
means to photograph, video and record the actions, events or utterances
that occur in their immediate locale, thereby creating an indelible digital
record of phenomena that would otherwise be fleeting and transitory.
Everyone using email and participating in social media is creating dur-
able digital content that, as soon as it is sent or posted, escapes from their
control. This banalization of recording creates a vast and rapidly expand-
ing reservoir of digital content that can be recovered and transmitted
much more quickly and easily than was the case with content recorded
in non-digital forms.
Second, the proliferation of online media means that anyone can now
transmit (or re-transmit) images, messages and other symbolic content
with relative ease: there is no need to try to persuade the institutional
gatekeepers of the established media channels to pay attention to and
transmit your content. Uploading a video on Facebook or YouTube, or
a photo on Twitter or Instagram, couldn’t be easier. This democratization
of transmission turns everyone into a potential source of viewable and
shareable content (though potential is not the same as actual, of course).
The banalization of recording coupled with the democratization of
transmission means that social and political life is now awash with digi-
tized symbolic content that outstrips, at an ever-increasing pace, the
ability of any individual or organization to control it. It renders much
more complex the power dynamics embedded in the acts of recording and
transmitting symbolic content, turning every bystander into a potential
witness who has the means at their disposal to provide audio-visual evi-
dence for what they are witnessing – exactly in the way that Ramsey Orta
recorded the manhandling of Eric Garner by the NYPD on Staten Island
one afternoon in July 2014, capturing the events on his cell phone and
enabling millions of others, widely dispersed in space and time, to see and
hear Garner being forced to the ground and utter ‘I can’t breathe’ 11
times before he passed out and subsequently died – a tragedy that, thanks
in part to the video clip that was uploaded onto YouTube, sparked off
protests against police brutality in many cities across the US and helped
Thompson 23

to fuel the sense of injustice that has underpinned the Black Lives Matter
movement.
The new forms of visibility created by the media can be a risk for
political leaders too. However much a political leader, actual or aspiring,
might seek to manage the way that they appear before the distant others
who know them only through mediated forms of interaction, they cannot
completely control it: there’s always the risk that something they said or
did in the past, or in settings that they regarded as back regions or private
spaces, will be recalled and injected into the front regions of mediated
interaction in ways and at times that could disrupt, compromise or
undermine the self-image they wish to project, as Anthony Weiner, the
US Congressman who used Twitter to send a sexually explicit image of
his erect penis to a young woman, discovered to his cost, as did Trump
when the video recording of his lewd and sexist remarks about women
(‘Grab ’em by the pussy’) was released by The Washington Post in the
midst of the 2016 US presidential election campaign. However much an
individual, group of individuals or organization may think that their
actions or conversations are confidential and clothed in secrecy, they
may find that information documenting these actions or recordings of
these conversations are leaked into the public domain.
This is exactly why phenomena like leaks and scandals have become so
significant in the mediated field of modern politics today: they are occu-
pational hazards in the age of mediated visibility. Leaks, as we’ve seen,
typically involve the divulging of information about back-region behav-
iour into the front regions of mediated interaction. Scandals do this too,
but scandals involve more than this because scandals presuppose a cer-
tain kind of response. Leaks can fall on deaf ears and still be leaks;
scandals can be scandals only if the disclosures precipitate some degree
of public disapproval or outrage.
Of course, scandals are not new – or, to be more precise, the word
‘scandal’ is not new: it predates the rise of the media by many centuries
(Thompson, 2000). Indeed, the word can be traced all the way back to
Ancient Greek and early Judaeo-Christian thought. But from the 17th
century on, ‘scandal’ was increasingly interwoven with claims and coun-
ter-claims articulated in print. By the early 19th century, a new social
phenomenon had come into being – what I call ‘scandal as a mediated
event’. This modern phenomenon of mediated scandal had a distinctive
structure and dynamic: it involved the disclosure through the media of
some action or activity which was previously hidden from view, which
involved the transgression of certain values and norms and which, on
being disclosed, elicited public expressions of disapproval and outrage.
Activities that were carried out secretly or in privacy were suddenly made
visible in the public domain, and the disclosure and condemnation of
these activities in the press served in part to constitute the event as a
scandal. Mediated visibility was not a retrospective commentary on a
24 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

scandalous event: rather, it was partly constitutive of the event as a

scandal.
While the 19th century was the birthplace of mediated scandal, the
20th and early 21st centuries would become its true home. Once this
distinctive type of event had been invented, it would become a recogniz-
able genre that some would seek actively to produce while others would
strive, with varying degrees of success, to avoid. The character and fre-
quency of political scandals varied greatly from one national context to
another and from one time period to another. But it is undoubtedly the
case that political scandal has become a more prevalent feature of public
life in the US, Britain and many modern liberal democracies since the
early 1960s – from Watergate in the US and the Profumo scandal in the
UK through to the great MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009–10, the sexual
harassment scandals that have shaken Westminster and the numerous
scandals and potential scandals that continue to swirl around Trump.
Almost every country you look at today has its many political scandals,
great and small – Brazil is currently in a state of crisis because of a huge
corruption scandal, so too is South Africa, and the list goes on. But, at
the end of the day, do these scandals matter? Maybe scandals are just the
superficial froth of political life, whipped up by unscrupulous tabloid
newspapers that want to sell more copies – that is the way they are
seen by many. But in my view, this way of thinking about scandals is
completely wrong. Scandals are much more important than this. And the
reason why scandals matter so much is simple: they matter because they
touch on real sources of power.
To understand this, we have to distinguish between two different forms
of power, what I call political power and symbolic power, and we have to
see that, in modern democratic societies, the exercise of political power
actually depends on symbolic power. To exercise political power in
modern democratic societies, you have to use symbolic power to win
and secure the support of others – in other words, you have to persuade
them to support you. And to do this, you need specific kinds of resources:
you need resources like prestige, reputation and trust. You need these
resources to exercise symbolic power, and since political power depends
on symbolic power, you need them to exercise political power too. And
this is why scandals matter so much in the world of politics: they matter
because they can deplete the resources on which the exercise of symbolic
power depends. Scandals threaten to drain away reputation and trust –
they don’t necessarily drain away these resources, but they have the cap-
acity to do so. They are potential reputation and trust depleters. But
these are exactly the kinds of resources you need if you want to be
able to exercise symbolic power, and hence to acquire, exercise and
retain political power as well. This is why politicians are so worried
about scandals: they know that scandals can damage their reputation
Thompson 25

and destroy trust, and hence can undermine their ability to acquire and
exercise political power.
So if this account is right, it would be quite mistaken to think of
scandals as superficial or frivolous distractions from the real substance
of politics: scandals matter because they impinge on real sources of
power. They tell us something important about the very nature
of power and about the way that power is acquired, exercised and lost
in the mediated field of modern politics. They help us see that the exercise
of political power in modern democratic societies depends on another
form of power – symbolic power – which has to be carefully nurtured and
protected if an individual wishes to acquire, exercise and retain political
power. And they also help us to see that the mediated field of modern
politics is a battlefield in which actors are using whatever media channels
they have at their disposal – newspapers, TV, Twitter, etc. – to intervene
in the field, pursue their agendas, exercise symbolic power and contest the
symbolic power of others, seek to tarnish the reputation of others and to
protect and defend their own.
Today we live in an age of high media visibility, which means that
political life now unfolds in an information environment where the cap-
acity to reveal and conceal, to make things visible and keep other things
hidden, is much more difficult to control, creating a permanently
unstable arena in which leaks, revelations and disclosures are always
capable of disrupting the most well-laid plans. The digital revolution
and the proliferation of new networks of communication and informa-
tion flow have only exacerbated these developments, creating an infor-
mation environment in which the leakage of information and the
disclosure of previously hidden actions and events is a constant risk
and threat. In this respect, the digital revolution has not altered my
way of thinking about these issues. But it has reminded us all of just
how fragile this arena now is, just how fluid the boundary between public
and private life has now become and just how important it is for us as
social scientists to try to understand this turbulent new world of
mediated visibility in the digital age.

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John B. Thompson is Professor of Sociology at the University of

Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.