Page 45 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 35
to argue for a place for Arnold Bennett or even Ernest Hemingway on the
university curriculum.
The debate with the mass society outlook in America—chiefly conducted from
the late 1930s through to the 1950s—took a different form. This was, in good
part, because the debate was conducted by sociologists rather than, as in Britain,
by literary or cultural theorists. This had two consequences. First, the debate
focused more on the ‘social organization’ than on the ‘cultural’ end of the mass
society critique: the question as to whether the thesis of social atomization could
be substantiated, that is to say, was more to the fore than questions concerning
the cultural consequences of the development of the media. Second, reflecting
the markedly positivist theoretical culture of American sociology at the time, the
debate was conducted in an empirical rather than a speculative mode as an
attempt was made to check whether the central tenets of the mass society thesis
would stand up to the test of controlled empirical examination.
In some studies, it is true, the central tenets of the mass society thesis seemed
to be empirically corroborated. In their Small Town in Mass Society, for
example, Vidich and Benseman argued that the media were ubiquitous,
overwhelming local organs of opinion formation to produce a situation in which,
politically, the small town had ‘surrendered’ to the mass society surrounding it.
The preponderant tendency of the period, however, was to undercut rather than
to underwrite the terms of the mass society critique. Detailed studies of audience
reactions to and use of the media played a particularly important role in this
respect, suggesting that the average member of the audience ‘reacts not merely
as an isolated personality but also as a member of the various groups to which he
belongs and with which he communicates’ (Lazarsfeld and Kendall, 1949, p.
399). Such primary groups as the family, the church, the local trade-union branch
or business community, it was argued, were by no means moribund—as the mass
society critique had implied—but constituted the filters, the points of mediation,
between the individual and the media. In short, it was argued that the audience,
far from being a homogeneous mass, was profoundly heterogeneous, the way in
which media messages were received and interpreted—and, consequently, the
effects that might be imputed to them—being conditioned by the primary group
pressures to which they were subject en route to the individual. Equally, if the
audience was not homogenized, neither were the media. Nor were they
necessarily distant and remote, impersonally relaying messages to an anonymous
audience. Morris Janowitz, in a study of community newspapers, thus showed
that these tended to have flourished rather than to have declined under the
pressure of the national media and, in view of this, was able to argue that the
media, rather than destroying local communities, often played a vital role in their
maintenance (Janowitz, 1952).
An attempt was made, as an extension of this argument, to transform the
phrase ‘mass society’ from a pejorative into a positive term. Having condemned
the mass society critique on the grounds of its excessive élitism, for example,
Edward Shils proceeded to appropriate the term ‘mass society’ in support of a