Page 38 - Culture Society and the Media

28 THEORIES OF THE MEDIA AND SOCIETY
relations of class domination are reproduced and perpetuated or, to the contrary,
challenged and overthrown.

THEORIES OF MASS SOCIETY AND THE CRITIQUE OF
MASS CULTURE
The range and diversity of the theorists who are normally regarded as having
contributed to the development of mass society theory is forbidding. We have
thus, to name but a few, cultural theorists such as Matthew Arnold, T.S.Eliot,
Friedrich Nietzsche and Ortegay Gasset; political theorists such as John Stuart Mill
and Alexis de Tocqueville; the students of crowd or mass psychology from
Gustave le Bon to Wilhelm Reich and Hannah Arendt; and, finally, such
representatives of the Italian school of sociology as Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano
Mosca. Although conventionally grouped together as ‘mass society theorists’ on
the somewhat loose grounds that they share the same vocabulary, the concerns
articulated within these diverse traditions are, in some respects, quite different.
These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that the mass society conception
has been complemented by the parallel perceptions of social theorists working in
other areas. The writings of the founding fathers of classical sociology have been
particularly important in this respect. There can be little doubt that the theories of
such scholars as Ferdinand Tönnies and Emile Durkheim concerning the
implications of the dissolution of traditional forms of social relationships for the
maintenance of social cohesion did much to lend academic weight and credence
to the thesis of social atomization which underpins most variants of mass society
theory (see Bramson, 1961). It is, as a result, somewhat difficult to draw a clearly
defined boundary line around the mass society tradition which tends, rather, to be
‘fuzzy’ at the edges, merging imperceptibly with the related theoretical traditions
upon which it has drawn at various moments in its history.
The mass society tradition, then, by no means constitutes a unified and tightly
integrated body of theory. It should rather be viewed as a loosely defined
‘outlook’ consisting of a number of intersecting themes—the decline of the
‘organic community’, the rise of mass culture, the social atomization of ‘mass
man’. Taken collectively, these have articulated a polyphony of negative and
pessimistic reactions to the related processes of industrialization, urbanization,
the development of political democracy, the beginnings of popular education and
the emergence of contemporary forms of ‘mass communication’.
The themes which comprise this outlook, however, have been orchestrated in
different ways within different strands of the mass society tradition. For some
theorists, responsibility for the emergence of mass society is imputed to the
incorporation of ‘the masses’ within the formal processes of government via the
extension of the franchise. For others, it is imputed to the levelling and
homogenizing effects of a market economy or to the preponderance which has
been given to the opinion of the ‘average man’ by the development of the press.
Similarly, whilst some fear the threat to élite values of excellence embodied in