Joshua Meyrowitz

In "The Rise of Glocality" (2004), Meyrowitz proposes that "all experience is local"; that is, all physical experiences are proximal to our physical bodies. Despite the sophistication of technology - allowing us to communicate and experience people and places far from us and multi-task, we still engage this technology (thus, have the experience) in the time and place in which we are physically located. "The localness of experience is a constant." However, he argues that we do not necessarily construct our concepts or understanding of events (local or distant) from a uniquely local perspective. Different media allow us to incorporate "external perspectives" with which to understand and relate to the local and the distant.

In No Sense of Place, which won the 1986 "Best Book on Electronic Media" Award of the National Association of Broadcasters and the Broadcast Education Association, Meyrowitz uses the example of the television to describe how communication technologies have shaped and influenced the social relations we encounter on a daily basis, proposing that television has been responsible for a significant cultural shift towards new and egalitarian social interactions. He argues that television is a "secret exposing" machine that allows individuals to watch others in an unprecedented fashion. According to Meyrowitz, new media like television have removed barriers and increased access to previously restricted information is responsible for the shift in cultural and social barriers between children and adults, men and women, and even humanizing and demystifying the powerful. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation also entitled No Sense of Place, which was completed in 1978 in the Media Ecology doctoral program at New York University; Christine Nystrom was Meyrowitz's thesis adviser, and the other members of his dissertation committee were Henry Perkinson and Neil Postman. In 1982, Postman published The Disappearance of Childhood, which discussed themes similar to one of the case studies in Meyrowitz's dissertation.

Joshua Meyrowitz (born 1949) is a professor of communication at the department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has published works regarding the effects of mass media, including No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, an analysis of the effects various media technologies have caused, particularly television.