Page 281 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

MASS MEDIA AND SECULARIZATION
The notion of secularization has been fundamental to understanding
modernity since Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. What we mean by it here
is the separation of citizens from attachments to religious and ideological
“faiths,” and the decline of institutions based on these faiths that once
structured wide parts of European social life. Just as the Church is no
longerabletocontrolthesocializationorbehaviorofpopulationsnowat-
tractedtovaluesandinstitutionsoutsidethefieldoffaith,soparties,trade
unions, and other institutions that structured the political order Lipset
and Rokkan (1967) once described as essentially “frozen,” can no longer
hegemonize the citizen’s community life. The European political order
was once organized around social institutions rooted in ideological com-
mitments based on broad social divisions, especially those of social class
and religion. The ties of individuals to these groups was central both to
their identity and to their material well-being. These institutions also
had broad functions in structuring the public sphere, creating and cir-
culating cultural and political symbols, and organizing the participation
of citizens in the life of the community. By secularization we mean the
decline of a political and social order based on these institutions, and
its replacement by a more fragmented and individualized society. With
the general decline of parties, trade unions, churches, and similar insti-
tutions, the mass media, along with many other socialization agencies,
become more autonomous of them, and begin to take over many of the
functions they once performed.
The “depillarization” of Dutch society is perhaps the classic example
of this change. Pillarization, as we saw in Chapter 6, was the separation
of the population into organized subcommunities based on religious
or political persuasion. The Dutch pillars maintained a wide variety of
institutions – schools, hospitals, social clubs, welfare organizations, and
mass media – and carried out a wide range of social functions, including
the production of symbolic meaning, the “aggregation of interests” and
organization of political decision making, the organization of leisure
time, the provision of social welfare, and more (Lijphart 1968, 1977,
1999; Lorwin 1971; Nieuwenhuis 1992). In the field of communication,
an individual could spend his or her entire life within a flow of represen-
tations structured by the institutions of a single pillar. By the 1970s, this
structure had broken down, and “the average Dutch citizen had become
primarily an individual consumer rather than a follower of a particular
religious or political sector” (Nieuwenhuis 1992: 207).

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