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Abstract

This article unearths Raymond Williams’ approach to communication as transport and social networks. Existing literature argues that the field of communication’s withdrawal from the study of transport leads to at least two setbacks: media presentism and a narrowed meaning of communication and culture. This article excavates Williams’ concept of ‘communication as transport and social networks’ by first revisiting his larger method of cultural materialism that sees communication as a whole complex assemblage of different modes of communication to facilitate connection. This is then followed by a discussion on the use of this concept in his various works and, more intensively, in The Country and the City. To emphasize Williams’ relevance to contemporary contexts, the next part of the article deals with an analysis of how digital media and contemporary transport networks facilitate the reproduction of Bali as a paradise. This article calls for a more dialectical understanding of communication that includes the inextricable relations between mobility and sociality, the material and the symbolic, and the transmission and the ritual in shaping human lives.

Keywords

Bali communication cultural materialism cultural studies Raymond Williams transport

Earlier research on communication and culture includes within it a serious consideration of transport as means of communication (Carey, 1981; Innis, 1972 [1923]; Williams, 1973; also see Popp, 2011, for research in the Interwar era). However, at the present time, research on transport and the material network of mobility is not just abandoned by the discipline, but is also often considered irrelevant to the study of communication and culture (with a few exceptions such as that of de Souza e Silva, 2013, 2017a, 2017b; McCracken and Teer-Tomaselli, 2013; Mattelart and Siegelaub, 1983; Morley, 2011, 2017; Packer and Robertson, 2006; Packer and Wiley, 2012), leaving such concerns to other fields such as geography and sociology (Cresswell and Merriman, 2016; Kellerman, 1984, 2011; Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2010, 2012a, 2012b). This withdrawal from the study of transport leads to at least two setbacks. The first setback is the media-centric tendency in the field of communication and culture that focuses exploration on directly observable cases of media, neglecting the longue durée of the historical development of communication as a whole complex assemblage of different modes of communication to facilitate connection and exchange. This leads to an obsession to what David Morley (2017) calls ‘cultural presentism’, a fascination for the communication technologies of the present with little regard for the historical continuities of past technologies and their attendant logic that still shape contemporary communication (p. 37).

Another setback is the narrowing down of the idea of communication and culture to refer to the realm of the symbolic and cultural and thereby distancing it from the realm of the material and political economic. The break between the realm of the symbolic versus the nonsymbolic is best exemplified in the work of James Carey (1989), in which an antagonism between ‘a transmission view of communication’ and ‘a ritual view of communication’ is made (pp. 15–18). At present, this separation is manifested in the differentiation between ‘communication’ representing the realm of the symbolic, ideas and consciousness and ‘communications’ representing the nonsymbolic aspect such as infrastructures and technology (Sterne, 2006: 123).

The problem in both cultural studies – after Williams – and political economy is the narrowing down of the concept of culture and economy to a mere abstraction. That is, the focus of political economy is reduced to an attention to ‘commodity’, while the focus of cultural studies is reduced to ‘culture/ideology/representation/signifying practices’. Dan Schiller (1996) in Theorizing Communication has analyzed this symptom, which he calls the process of ‘reification’ of culture (p. 184). Attempts to formulate the connection between the two have been made both within the field of cultural studies (Calabrese and Sparks, 2004; Milner, 2002; Mosco, 2009; Peck, 2001, 2006; Slack, 2012) and in the broader social and cultural theory (Butler, 1997; Chibber, 2013; Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Sum and Jessop, 2013). One of these attempts is an effort to return the study of transport to social and cultural analysis (Packer and Robertson, 2006; Sheller, 2012, 2018; Sheller and Urry, 2006). Morley (2017), for example, shows how incorporating the transport network to our study of culture can help us to demonstrate that the symbolic – discourse, rhetoric – is material as much as the material is symbolic (p. 30).

To address these setbacks, we need to revisit the definition of ‘communication’ and to emphasize how doing so contributes to the broader social and cultural theory. It is in Williams’ work that we see the relations between communication and culture as inextricable from each other. After all, Raymond Williams – one of the founders of British cultural studies – is a cultural and literary analyst who pays serious attention to communication. Christian Fuchs explains the connection between culture and communication in Williams’ theoretical universe as follows:

The creation of culture requires ‘communication and the making of institutions’ (p. 126). For Williams (1981a: 13), culture is a signifying system, consisting of practices through which ‘a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’ (Williams, 1981a: 13). This means that wherever there is culture, there is communication. When we communicate, we constitute culture. (Fuchs, 2017: 745)

The production of culture requires communication and its institutions, and practices of communication always constitute culture. Social order is (re)produced, challenged and renewed through signifying practices in communication that, as Jim McGuigan suggests, include features of interpersonal communication such as language, gesture, expression, and interactions and those of mass communication such as effects and designs of particular technologies (McGuigan, 2019: 43). Essentially, for Williams, society is a form of communication in which ‘all processes are discursively mediated’ (p. 47). ‘Whereas communication is the social production of meanings, culture is the system in which communication takes place’ (Fuchs, 2017: 749). Unearthing the concept of communication as transport and social networks helps expand social and cultural analysis. This article’s return to Williams joins an ongoing effort to uncover Williams’ legacy in contemporary analysis of media and culture (Ellcessor, 2018; Karvelyte, 2020; McGuigan, 2019; McGuigan and Moran, 2014; Steele, 2020; Stevenson, 2019, 2020).

By reconstructing Raymond Williams’ work, this article calls for the need to return the study of transport technologies and networks of mobility to communication and cultural studies and proposes a definition of ‘communication as transport and social networks’. To see how the relations between the symbolic/cultural and the non-symbolic/material are formulated in Williams’ universe, we start by discussing Williams’ view of cultural materialism that perceives means of communication as a means of (re)production of life in general. This view reveals human processes of and relations to (1) nature, (2) production processes, (3) mental conceptions and (4) social relations. We delve further into the inextricable relations between the two realms by unearthing Williams’ (1966, 1981) concept of communication as transport and social networks in his work as early as Communication and as late as Contact. In the subsequent section, we revisit Williams’ (1979) treatment of communication as transport and social communications in his analysis of London and England’s countryside in The Country and the City. Moving away from the case of London, we then examine how transport and social communications reveal the nature of the city and the country in the age of digital media and fast moving transport in contemporary Bali in Indonesia. The selection of Bali as a case study is meant to illustrate Williams’ view of communication, which is the main task of this article. The discussion of London here functions as a synecdoche to Williams’ work that unfortunately focuses mostly on England. Linking it with Bali shows the current relevance of his work beyond Britain to other parts of the world. Bali is chosen to showcase how Western colonialism and imperialism have created a replication of its capitalist formula of the country and the city in other seemingly remote places partly through transport and social networks. This analysis does call for further research exploring original case studies using Williams’ concept of transport and social communications.

Revisiting Williams’ cultural materialism

To go beyond the contrast and dichotomy between the transmission and the ritual and the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, it is important to revisit Williams’ method of cultural materialism (Fuchs, 2014; McGuigan, 2019; Milner, 2002) and to locate Williams in his Marxist roots. In a chapter on ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ in Capital Volume I, Karl Marx (1976 [1867]) explains the centrality of technology in the (re)production of human life in general:

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. (pp. 493n4)

Here, Marx explains that technology and material infrastructures reveal the processes of and our relations to (1) nature, (2) production processes, (3) mental conceptions and (4) social relations. He sets up these four categories as elements of the (re)production of life. This understanding enables Marx to explain how the introduction of machinery structures time, gender and generational relations, labor processes/relations, and mental conceptions in a way that fulfills capitalists’ purpose to accumulate profit within capitalism. Using Marx, this leads us to the question: how does communication technology reveal the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby how does it lay bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations?

Raymond Williams argues for the role of means of communication in revealing the reproduction of life in general. Williams’ argument centers on the idea that the specific means of communication are in essence a means of (re)production of life:

It is true that means of communication, from the simplest physical forms of language to the most advanced forms of communications technology, are themselves always socially and materially produced, and of course reproduced. Yet they are not only forms but means of production, since communication and its material means are intrinsic to all distinctively human forms of labour and social organization, thus constituting indispensable elements both of the productive forces and of the social relations of production. (Williams, 2005/1980: 50)

As humans (re)produce their relation to nature and the processes of production, social relations and mental life as explained by Marx above, we also (re)produce the means of communication as an integral and indispensable part of those processes. Notice that Williams here perceives the realm of the symbolic such as language and ideas as equally material as technology/infrastructures. They are both means of production and are indispensable elements in organizing our social relations.

Therefore, the means of communication, just like other technologies, are subject to historical development:

This is so, first, because the means of communication have a specific productive history, which is always more or less directly related to general historical phases of productive and technical capacity. It is so, second, because the historically changing means of communication have historically variable relations to the general complex of productive forces and to the general social relationships which are produced by them which the general productive forces both produce and reproduce. (Williams, 2005/1980: 50)

For example, the development in 20th-century societies of specific ‘communicative production’ – transport, printing and electronic industries – occurred in relation to industrial capitalist production in general (p. 53). Similarly, the network society characterized with digital media and fast moving transport networks develops in relation to the globalizing neoliberal economy and postindustrial society (Castells, 2000: 696). In this case, the means of communication played a larger role as a means of ‘social production’ that helps to organize the society. The study of the development of the means of communication, therefore, necessitates the study of the conditions of their development and vice versa.

In making sense of the separation between social communication and transport inaugurated with the invention of the telegraph (Packer and Robertson, 2006: 5), we can instead ask: what does this seeming separation conceal our understanding of the society? In actuality, material infrastructures of communication, such as undersea cable networks (Starosielski, 2015), continue to serve as the conditions of possibility for the symbolic form of (digital) communication to exist. On the contrary, the placement and operation of undersea cable networks are politically and ideologically laden. In this case, ideas and politics shape the design and the invention of these technologies. While communication became independent from transport since the invention of the telegraph, transportation today has become increasingly dependent on communication technologies (Packer, 2006: 81). Mimi Sheller (2012), for example, demonstrates how dependent air transportation is on social networks in which virtually all operations from the selling of tickets to air traffic control take place digitally. In addition, the meaning-making activities of window shopping in the airport and viewing movies on airplanes (Groening, 2014) further shows the inextricable relations between transport and the social.

Communication as transport and social networks

In reading Williams’ (1966, 1981) work as early as Communications and as late as Contact, one might notice his discussion of transport communication alongside his analyses of what is commonly now seen as the ‘social’ network of communication, such as television, literature and newspapers. His idea of ‘communication as transport and social networks’ is scattered throughout his works (Williams, 1966, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1981, 2005 [1980]), but is never given a complete treatment as a theory or a case study. Nevertheless, this notion warrants our serious attention. In what follows, I have attempted to reconstruct this concept by observing how Williams treats the connection between the two and how it helps him understand the role of means of communication in the reproduction of society in general.

There are two ways in which Williams discusses communication systems as transport networks and social networks. First, he looks at the historical development of the use of the word ‘communication’. In Communications (Williams, 1966), Television (Williams, 1975), Keywords (Williams, 1976) and Contact (Williams, 1981), he explains that the word ‘communication’ in English has changed meaning over a period of time due to the development of the means of communication. The word ‘communication’ was originally used to refer to ‘transport’, but as social communication, like the printing press, developed, the word carries with it two different meanings: one in terms of ‘transmission’, ‘movement’ and ‘transfer’ originating from the idea of transport, and the other as a ‘process of sharing’ implied by social communication (Williams, 1973: 17, 1976: 62–63).

In other works, Williams provides a concrete historical study of the development of the two meanings in looking at the development of the British printing press. Williams notes how the existing technological developments create a certain necessity for a new mode of communication. ‘As the struggle for a share in decision and control became sharper, in campaigns for the vote and then in competition for the vote, the press became not only a new communications system but, centrally, a new social institution’ (Williams, 1975: 21–22). In this case, not only did the railways help the birth of newspapers, it also played a major role in assigning a new function of newspapers as ‘social institution’:

For of course this new popular press was made possible only by significant technical developments: steam printing, cheaper production of paper, the telegraph for news-gathering, the railways for rapid distribution . . . The railways, of course, were primarily developed for moving people and goods, but, once built, transformed the social relations of newspaper distribution. (Williams, 1981: 231)

Williams here argues for an understanding of a complex interaction and interrelation between transport and the social, which develop dialectically. Because the relation between transport and newspapers was not one of cause and effect, it is important to highlight that as transport was involved in transforming newspapers as a new social institution, newspapers at the same time altered transport’s function from a means of mere transfer of people and goods to a symbolic means of mobility in general. Daily schedules of trains and ships on newspapers, for example, shape the idea of regularity and access to distant places, which is no longer measured by distance but rather by hours. In this case, transport is as much ‘social’ as newspapers in that it structures human social and symbolic lives (Williams, 1975: 22).

The second way in which Williams discusses the notion of ‘communication systems as transport networks and social networks’ is by treating it beyond a mere historical description, and observing and developing it to the level of a ‘concept’:

From another familiar approach, through traditional economics, we have seen the central concerns of society as property, production, and trade. These approaches remain important, but they are now joined by a new emphasis: that society is a form of communication, through which experience is described, shared, modified, and preserved. (Williams, 1966: 18)

In this excerpt, Williams identifies a different meaning of communication drawn from the perspective of human experience, which involves community creation, sharing and participation – which Carey calls ‘the ritual’ – beyond their traditional functions of serving economic and political goals – the ‘transmission’. By highlighting communication as a ‘creative activity’ inherent to human agency and practical action, Williams reminds us that even existing institutions and means of communication – business, transport – are also an expression of human creative activity, a past response to its particular condition of reality.

What is important for Williams is to perceive communication as a whole as a creative activity:

[I]t is by learning to perceive, to describe and to communicate description to others that we create the common reality of our lives . . . For there are no ‘entirely different order(s), economic, political – what you will’; there is one lived reality, within which we respond and act in varying forms. (Williams, 1981: 435)

The ‘one lived reality’ of communication consists of a whole social complex system, or assemblage, of different modes of communication that facilitate human connection and exchanges.

Williams’ take on the function of social communication as an arena of sharing and community-making is seen first as a historical development and second as a development in relation to the more traditional political economic function of transport communication. For Williams, this does not mean that ‘social communication’ carries with it just a cultural and symbolic function, while ‘transport communication’ bears a political and economic function; ‘social communication’ can also play a political and economic role and ‘transport communication’ a cultural and symbolic one. Both are outcomes of human creative activity, which is experienced in one lived reality. In addition, we can also derive from Williams a view that while technology – and immaterial things – are central in human life, their influences stem from cultural meanings and the significance given to them by people in the first place.

The Country and the City: from London to Bali

In order to evaluate the methodological soundness of the notion ‘communication as transport and social networks’, we will revisit Williams’ (1973) treatment of transport and social communications in his The Country and the City. How does he explain the cultural and symbolic function of transport networks and the political and economic function of social networks? Following Karl Marx’s four areas of emphases discussed previously, we explore below Williams’ treatment of transport and social networks in The Country and the City in terms of their relations with nature, modes of production, social relations and mental conceptions. I argue that his understanding of communication as whole social relations that include modes of sociality and mobility allows him to develop lasting concepts, including ‘structure of feeling’ and ‘mobile privatization’. Williams’ understanding of communication continues to be relevant in thinking about the contemporary world as we delve further into tourism and the global economy in Bali, Indonesia, to showcase the applicability of Williams’ thoughts beyond England and the Western world.

The Country and the City is Williams’ personal and intellectual endeavor to understand the complex historical transformation of the relationship between the city and the country through the study of literature. Literature as a particular means of production is seen as an active ‘response’ to its historical conditions. Williams argues that the study of the means of production must be coupled with the study of the conditions of their existence, because ‘the conditions of the means of production are quite crucial to any substantial understanding of the means of production themselves’ (Williams, 1979: 304). He clarifies that ‘means of production’ refers to not just ‘techniques but whole social relationships’ (p. 305) that surround the utilization, regulation, and design of these machineries and artifacts. This clarification explains that, while the literature from the 16th century onward is Williams’ source of data, he by no means focuses only on the texts. Instead, as we will see shortly, he brings to bear seemingly disparate aspects of life – from transport to agricultural production – to understand how literature contributes to the production of the antagonism between the city and the country. This method of understanding culture is manifested in Williams’ own concept of ‘structure of feeling’, in which emotions, moods and human experiences are understood as historical and social phenomena. With such a concept, ‘the exploration of relations between apparently separate elements of the way of life [various images of community, class differences, industry, institutions, emotions, thought and art] can be illuminated’ (cited in McGuigan, 2019: 32). In this regard, the structure of feeling serves to illuminate seemingly disparate things to form an explanation of one lived reality.

In thinking about nature, Williams traces how social changes were conditioned by the changes in a sense of space and time which were conditioned more and more by the mode of profit accumulation. The book is a sustained polemic against the promotion of superficial comparisons between city (conscious intelligence, evil, mundane) and country (custom, unadulterated, natural) that tend to look nostalgically toward an idealized past and hence to recuperate the values of the ruling-class agrarian order. Williams explains how not only did capitalism transform the country and the city, but how, based on agrarian capitalism, traditional peasantry came to an end. The myth of an idealized country was then built and reproduced through literature.

From this perspective, the myth of the ideal countryside is seen as a response to the development of cities. In his discussion of the works of several 19th-century novelists, Williams reports that there was a particular kind of city emerging within capitalism in England at the time that was characterized by processes of urbanism and industrialism. These cities were specifically built as ‘places to work’. But Williams also explains that central to that process is the existence of transportation, notably railways, which were a part and parcel of the development of cities. Transportation in this case has not only transformed geography and nature but also, through the new social mobility (also made possible by newspapers and literature), served to extend cultures, ideas and social life (Williams, 1973: 220, 253).

Transport also transforms the mode of production and the social relations of production. In his observation of 1868–1870s Britain, Williams notes that the sharp increase in imports of food – via the availability of steamships and railways to reach inland – had expanded the market for the overall population in England so much that there was a corresponding increase in demand for meat and dairy, as opposed to bread. In turn, this affected the decline of agriculture, especially the production of grain. As imports and exports of goods continued to increase, London took a different meaning as a ‘capital city of a complex national and overseas economy and society’. The city became organized in terms of trade, as a ‘centre of trades and of distribution: of skilled craftsmen in metals and in print; of clothing and furniture and fashion; of all the work connected with shipping and the market’. In other words, as the city became connected with shipping and the international market, it also became a center of production and distribution of fashion, print, metal and furniture. Williams also suggests that the separation between production and consumption (‘practical’ and ‘aesthetic’) is largely a part of social history. For example, the English countryside, which used to be where crops were produced, eventually became symbolically transformed into the place of unadultered nature, ‘as objects of conspicuous aesthetic consumption’. The idea of country underwent a change from being seen as the center of agricultural production to its adoption of a new identity as a place of ‘nature’, a place for retreat and solace from ordinary and mundane life of the city, and thus an object of urban people’s consumption (Williams, 1973: 147, 154, 128–129, 187).

So far we have talked about nature and modes of production, but transport systems also changed social relations and mental conceptions. ‘The communication system is not only the information network but also the transport network’, Williams says. ‘The city, obviously, has always been associated with concentration of traffic . . . But traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations’ (p. 296). Williams carries on, to explain the kind of consciousness and social relations that emerge out of modern cars and the way they are organized in traffic:

It is impossible to read the early descriptions of crowded metropolitan streets – the people as isolated atoms, flowing this way and that; a common stream of separated identities and directions – without seeing, past them, this mode of relationship embodied in the modern car: private, enclosed, an individual vehicle in a pressing and merely aggregated common flow . . . [pursuing] our ultimately separate ways but in a common mode. (p. 296)

Modern cars reflect the atomization of society. Streets are shared common spaces that are otherwise used for the pursuit of private individual goals by isolated individuals in their private, enclosed vehicles. This reflection would later emerge as a concept of ‘mobile privatization’, which McGuigan (2019) argues as ‘one of Williams’s most original contributions to the sociology of modernity in general as well as to media and cultural analysis in particular’ (p. 132). Mobile privatization is ‘the dominant form of subjectivity . . . available to persons living in the technologically intensive spaces of consumer capitalism’ (as cited in McGuigan, 2019: 132) characterized with ‘enhanced public mobility and the privatization of social life’ (McGuigan, 2019: 133). The reflection began with motorcar traffic in his 1964 novel Second Generation and was later developed to think about how a similar phenomenon is reproduced with television consumption (Williams, 1975). Since then, this study of social relations and culture around cars has been developed to also think about issues of race and class (Gilroy, 2001). Thinking about transport as a form of consciousness and social relations that Willliams suggests here is especially crucial for our current global challenge. In response to the ongoing global environmental crisis, governments and technocrats focus more on technological fixes such as driverless cars, electric vehicles and ridesharing, instead of addressing how the capitalist logic behind these fixes continues to exacerbate the break of our community ties.

It is important to highlight that the development of Williams’ lasting concepts such as structure of feeling and mobile privatization is actually tied to his understanding of communication as whole social relations that include transport networks. In McGuigan’s (2019) words, Raymond Williams’ ‘treatment of communication technologies was sociologically astute, avoiding not only technological determinism but also media-centrism’ (p. 132). Common interpretation and use of Williams’ work often focus only on the realm of social networks. However, his concepts of communication are actually rooted in his understanding of communication as both transport and social networks.

How might Williams’ understanding of communication be useful to think about our contemporary world? What is the nature of the city and the country in the age of digital media and fast moving, affordable transport? In the next discussion, we will reflect on Bali to assess the relevance of Williams’ concept to current problems and to show its use to think about other parts of the world beyond England. After all, as Marx and Gramsci separately have noted, the antagonism of the city and the country is tied with the development of capitalism (Gramsci, 1971: 90–102; Marx, 1976 [1867]: 241, 505–506, 785) that has over time expanded its claws globally. One area in which the global capitalist economy replicates the city and its necessary other, that is the country, is tourism (see Urry, 1990, 2002; Urry and Larsen, 2011). In our analysis of Bali below, we will explore how Bali since the early 20th century has been developed from a particular perspective of a global relation between the country and the city. It was to be developed according to what John Urry (2002) calls ‘the tourist gaze’, a particular form of discursive, physical and spatial consumption for leisure and nonwork purposes enabled partly by the development of transport and social communication. In this case, Bali is the countryside created to satisfy the colonizing and imperialist gaze of Europeans, Westerners and, later, middle and upper class Indonesians.

‘A holy sanctuary. A captivating culture. Sublimely sacred. Yet also excitingly profound. The ultimate paradise’. This is not a description of a country in 19th-century England; rather, it is an advertisement for Bali released in 2020 as a part of the ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ tourism campaign by Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy. Bali, one of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago, is often described as a paradise. Adjectives such as mesmerizing, exotic and unique are juxtaposed with images of paddy terraces, white sandy beaches and Hindu worshippers in a temple (Pratiwi et al., 2017). This dominant image of Bali has been created and sustained actively by both Westerners and Balinese (Vickers, 2012: 31). However, Adrian Vickers – a historian of Bali – explains that this idea of paradise is in fact a recent invention. For a long time, during Dutch colonialism in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), the image of Bali and its people was depicted as ‘fierce, savage, perfidious, and bellicose people, loath to do any work’ (as cited in Vickers, 2012: 22). This orientalist view was an excuse for the Dutch to ‘tame’ and ‘civilize’ Bali through a ‘long and bloody struggle’ (Vickers, 2012: 23). Between 1920s and 1930s, the Dutch government began to promote Bali as a paradise partly to ‘have the world forget its ruthless conquest of the island’, and by 1950s this image was affixed (pp. 23–24).

Seen from a pastoral lens, paradise Bali is given a sense of ‘timeless backwater’ characterized with unadulterated nature, sacred culture and ancient custom, just like Williams’ English countryside. While the image of Williams’ country is reproduced through literature, Bali’s image is built through mass media (Hobart, 2011: 71), notably advertisements and branding (Vickers, 2012: 537). Mark Hobart, whose research on mass media and Bali spanned several decades, argues that any governments ‘find it convenient to appeal to a noble past that they can engineer to justify present inequalities and exploitation’ (Hobart, 2011: 71), resonating with Williams’ view of an idealized past. In actuality, Hobart argues that Bali should be better understood as a ‘battlefield’ (Hobart, 2017). With mass media, corporate capitalism produces a romanticized depiction of Bali to attract and churn profit from tourism concealing its history of conflicts (see Robinson, 1998 on political violence in Bali). In analyzing representation and mass media, respectively, Vickers and Hobart unearth how social networks of communication play a direct role in reproducing the capitalist system in Bali. Our subsequent discussion will complement this by unearthing how transport networks and infrastructures of mobility shape economic production, social relations, and a particular mental outlook that strengthen this exploitative system.

To be sure, contemporary Bali is not a countryside. Bali ‘the country’ with its developed peasantry has been transformed into Bali ‘the paradise’ – a different version of the country – when the Dutch government conquered the area and tourism began in earnest shortly thereafter. The Dutch shipping company Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (Royal Packet Navigation Company), or KPM, was among the first companies that brought European tourists into the Indies around the turn of the 20th century (N.V. Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij, 1937). ‘KPM advertised all-inclusive tours, covering first-class steamship fare from Surabaya to Buleleng and back, as well as all travel expenses including landing fees, transport by private motor car, meals, lodgings, fees, and tips’ (Shavit, 2003: 49). Shavit’s description of KPM’s promotion of early tourism in Bali shows a practice that resembles modern tourism today. Tourism activity was purposed for the pleasure of seeing and entertainment and private lodging and transport ensured comfort and safety according to Western standards. This is different from traditional travelers who would go on a soul-searching journey to a faraway land and would immerse themselves in the lives of the locals. The modern travelers sleep in hotels or Airbnbs, go sightseeing in private motor cars, and are given selective experiences of living in ‘paradise’.

In this case, the practice of tourism introduced by and developed by the colonial government and, later, by the post-independent Indonesian government was done to promote imperialist purposes. Bali as a paradise manifested on advertisements and architectural sites was created to invite and affirm a colonialist gaze, reproducing orientalist stereotypes and ideology. By taking the country and the city outside of imperialist Britain, Edward Said’s concept of orientalism – the depiction of the orients with negative connotations produced for centuries in science and literature (Said, 1978) – expands Raymond Williams’ work where it does not go far enough in his anti-imperialist critique. Recent study shows how Williams’ country–city distinction continues to be reproduced to conceal the structural violence of capitalism and imperialism during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially vis-a-vis racialized division of labor and class (Kay and Wood, 2022).

In a way, paradise Bali is a consequence of new mobility. Indeed, Urry (1990) argues that before the 19th century, travel for non-work reasons was only available to ‘a narrow elite and was itself a mark of status’ (p. 24). Only after the development of the railway and the shipping lines was mass travel allowed. The expansion of transport networks and the enhancement of transport technology facilitates tourism and, with it, the development of hotels and entertainment sites. In the past, ‘[t]he lowlands in the south were a natural place to set up a complex wet-rice growing system, where the rivers that run off the mountains could be turned into an intricate system of channels and terraces’ (Vickers, 2012: 33). Now, the land and nature in South Bali has been turned into the tourist industry, where palaces and temples are found side by side with resort complexes, pubs and shopping malls. Architectural and interior designs adopt an image of the country such as villas with paddy terraces, temple-like buildings and sites adorned with Hindu paraphernalia.

Transport transforms the mode of production and the social relations of production. To maintain Bali as a place of retreat and as an object of aesthetic consumption, Bali is supported by a complex transport network that connects to Java to import additional crop and food supplies, and internationally to bring in steel, asphalts and other development materials from China, Singapore and elsewhere (Afriyadi, 2018; Arini, 2020; Sumantoro, 2018); all the while international and domestic airplanes bring in tourists from around the world. Consequently, wage workers and precariat laborers replace traditional peasantry; they work in hotels, travel and other entertainment businesses or infrastructural development. In less than a hundred years, Bali was transformed from ‘a peasant society to a platform for global consumer capitalism’, Hobart observes. ‘Society is being split into a managerial and professional middle class, which serves offshore capital, and a large proletariat, which sells more or less skilled labor at market price’ (Hobart, 2011: 71–72). From tourism, Bali contributed 28.9 percent to the national revenue (Balipostcom, 2020). Therefore, preserving the image as a paradise is not just in the interest of local officials but also of the Indonesian government that facilitates international investors. ‘Bali no longer belongs to Balinese but to international capital, a process of alienation by which Balinese energetically commoditize their culture while claiming the opposite’ (Hobart, 2011: 63). In order to produce an image of nature in Bali paradise, nature must be sacrificed, for example the past reclamation project of Benoa Bay. The paradise is, hence, a whole social relation that includes not just mass media representation but also, materially, transport networks, hotels, villas, entertainment sites and infrastructure development as well as the organization of human relations within them.

One manifestation of Bali in the contemporary era is the blurring boundaries of work and leisure facilitated by digital media. The Internet breaks the dichotomy of production and consumption. The emergence of digital nomads, ‘who travel the world while working remotely using the Internet’ (Chayka, 2018; also see Kale, 2020), turns Bali into a space of work. Now Bali has become a place of work and leisure. Unlike Williams’ previous analysis of the cities that were specifically built as places of work, digital media allows for work to happen everywhere, including in the country that was originally built for leisure. In addition, long distance transport becomes accessible and affordable to commoners, expanding tourism to the middle class. These people flock to paradise Bali and turn beach-front villages like Canggu into villas where they can surf and work at their leisure.

There is a myriad of research on social networks as a means of economic production, such as from the perspective of digital labor and mobile privatization (Andrejevic, 2011, 2020; Fuchs, 2014; Groening, 2013; Maly-Bowie, 2019) as well as media infrastructures (Parks and Starosielski, 2015). This article calls for an attention to the infrastructure of transport to understand how the social networks of digital media expand and transform geographical space and places of production. The case of Bali shows how the flexibility of work in the digital era means further development (and exploitation) of the land into a paradise. The flexibility of work facilitated by digital media and the affordable high-quality life as expats create a unique condition for the emergence of both local and international digital nomads in Bali. However, the same mobility cannot be enjoyed by working-class Indonesians/Balinese who continue to work as servants for the tourism industry in exchange for low wages. In this case, as middle-class digital nomads enjoy expanding mobility, local workers in Bali continue to experience limited mobility.

This inequality between Balinese and foreigners, especially as they relate as servers and tourists, respectively, is further exacerbated by the infrastructure. Most available transport for tourists is private in nature, such as taxis, hotel pickups, rental cars and motorcycles, and ridesharing GoCar and Uber. The relatively recent development of Jalan Tol Bali Mandara allows for a faster connection for private vehicles to the main tourist facilities. However, public transportation is virtually nonexistent in Bali, especially in tourist areas. The transport network is oriented for the maximization of profit by private companies. The nature of transport networks shapes the structure of feeling of paradise Bali that is characterized with the atomization of individuals. Tourists go about the island as isolated atoms with individual purposes alienated from ordinary lived experiences of the locals. Transport networks and the practice of mobility are created to further the practice of consumption. The expansion of tourism to include middle-class tourists in Bali should not be celebrated as a form of the democratization of leisure. Rather, it must be read as the expansion of profit-making tourism to the middle class.

Toward a capacious view of communication

Following Morley’s (2017) proposal for a ‘capacious definition of communications’ (p. 25; Popp, 2011: 460), this article is intended to think about returning the study of transport to our concept of communication in two ways. The first is to study communication with the awareness of the longue durée of the development of communication practices, technologies and networks. Approaching communication with a capacious understanding means to study the present and current cases of communication historically. Second, using this historical understanding, this article proposes that we understand communication in terms of a whole complex assemblage of communicative practices, technologies and infrastructures that include transport and social networks. The two networks, as Raymond Williams has demonstrated, have been continuously entangled both in the past and at present, be it in their invention, development and reproduction, so that it is difficult to separate out the importance of transport in the conceptual development of our current understanding of communication and culture. Studying communication in terms of the inextricable link between the modes and practices of mobility and sociability can unearth and illuminate new ways of thinking and understanding of our global society. For example, the recent exploration to planet Mars led by the United States, UAE and China opens up a new question about how transport networks change our understanding of the cosmos and our identity and relations as humans that are often tied to planet Earth.

Adopting this capacious understanding of communication transforms how we conceptualize our idea of change. Problems often associated with the symbolic and with ritual are deeply connected with those of undemocratic ownership and control of communication infrastructures and biases in the design of technologies. For example, gender, racial, class inequality are likely manifested both symbolically and materially in terms of restricted mobility and even immobility (on gendered mobilities, see Uteng and Cresswell, 2016; on mobility justice, Sheller, 2018). Thinking with Williams, this approach reveals how communication technology and infrastructures unearth the processes of and our relations to nature, production processes, mental conceptions and social relations. With this more capacious understanding, communications become indispensable to our understanding of human lives, including the problems that face us globally, and ways to change them.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rianne Subijanto

Biographical note

Rianne Subijanto is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her research interests include communication infrastructures, universal emancipation, social and environmental justice, and the history of colonialism and imperialism in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

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From London to Bali: Raymond Williams and communication as transport and social networks

Abstract

Keywords

Revisiting Williams’ cultural materialism

Communication as transport and social networks

The Country and the City: from London to Bali

Toward a capacious view of communication

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Biographical note

References