Page 36 - Culture Society and the Media

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Theories of the media, theories of society

TONY BENNETT

‘MASS’, ‘MEDIA’, ‘COMMUNICATIONS’?
The new media distinctively associated with the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries—the press, radio and television, the cinema and the record industry—
have traditionally been grouped together under the heading ‘mass media’ and their
study developed as a part of the sociology of mass communications. At one
level, this inherited vocabulary fulfils a useful descriptive function; we know
what is being referred to when such terms as ‘the media of mass communication’
are used. At another level, however, such terms may prove positively
misleading. It is clear, for example, that the media which are customarily referred
to in this way resemble one another only superficially. The relationships between
the state and broadcasting institutions, for example, are quite different from those
which obtain between the state and the press or, different yet again, between the
state and the cinema. Similarly, the relationship between industry and audience is
quite differently articulated in the case of the record industry as compared with
the film industry.
More important, perhaps, the vocabulary of ‘mass’, ‘media’ and
‘communications’ frequently involves particular assumptions about the nature of
such media, the processes of which they form a part and the ways in which these
are connected with broader social and political processes and relationships. In its
classical usage, for instance, the term ‘mass’ implied that the audience created by
the new media was socially undifferentiated, lacking any clear divisions along
class, sex or race lines. The other, the production side of the communication
process, it is true, was rarely filled in, at least not in any degree of explicit detail.
But the implication was clear. If the audience which constituted the receiving end
of the communication process was to be regarded as a ‘mass’ or ‘the masses’,
then the business of producing and transmitting messages was viewed as being
vested in the hands of an élite, however it may have been defined. It was in this
way that such terms as ‘mass media’ and ‘media of mass communication’
formed a part of a ready-built theory of society which answered in advance the
more pertinent questions that might be put concerning the connections between
the media and social processes. Between whom do the media