Page 208 - Culture Society and the Media

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Communications, power and social order

JAMES CURRAN (1)

Mass communications are generally discussed as if they were exclusively
modern phenomena. Indeed, this assumption is embodied in most social
scientific definitions of the mass media. According to McQuail (1969, p. 2), for
instance, ‘mass communications comprise the institutions and techniques by
which specialized groups employ technological devices (press, radio, films, etc.)
to disseminate symbolic content to large, heterogeneous, and widely dispersed
audiences’. Only modern technology, it is widely assumed, has made possible
the transmission of communications to mass audiences; for, as Maisel (1973, p.
160) amongst others would have us believe, ‘in the pre-industrial period, the
communication system was restricted to direct face-to-face communication
between individuals’.
In fact, a variety of signifying forms apart from face-to-face interaction—
buildings, pictures, statues, coins, banners, stained glass, songs, medallions, rituals
of all kinds—were deployed in pre-industrial societies to express sometimes
highly complex ideas. At times, these signifying forms reached vast audiences.
For instance, the proportion of the adult population in Europe regularly attending
mass during the central middle ages was almost certainly higher than the
(2)
proportion of adults in contemporary Europe regularly reading a newspaper .
Since the rituals of religious worship were laid down in set liturgies, the papal curia
exercised a much more centralized control over the symbolic content mediated
through public worship in the central middle ages than even the controllers of the
highly concentrated and monopolistic press of contemporary Europe.
Centralized control over mass communications is thus scarcely new. An
historical comparison with older communication forms—including
communications reaching small élites as well as mass audiences—serves,
moreover, to throw into sharp relief certain aspects of the impact of
communication media that the ‘effects’ research tradition, relying upon survey
and experimental laboratory research techniques, has tended to ignore. Our
concern will be with the impact of communications on the power structures of
society. In particular, attention will be focused upon the effect of new media in
bringing into being new power groups whose authority and prestige have derived
from their ability to manipulate the communications under their control; the
consequences of their rise in generating new tensions and rivalries within the