Page 63 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 53
of media research in the United States in the 1940s. Its ascendancy paralleled the
institutional hegemony of American behavioural science on a world scale in the
hey-day of the 1950s and early 1960s. Its decline paralleled that of the paradigms
on which that intellectual hegemony had been founded. Though theoretical and
methodological questions were of central importance in this change of direction,
they certainly cannot be isolated from their historical and political contexts. This
is one of the reasons why the shifts between the different phases of research can,
without too much simplification, also be characterized as a sort of oscillation
between the American and the European poles of intellectual influence.
To understand the nature of media research in the period of the behavioural
mainstream hegemony, and its concern with a certain set of effects, we must
understand the way it related, in turn, to the first phase of media research. For,
behind this concern with behavioural effects lay a longer, less scientific and
empirical tradition of thought, which offered, in a speculative mode, a set of
challenging theses about the impact of the modern media on modern industrial
societies. Basically European in focus, this larger debate assumed a very
powerful, largely unmediated set of effects attributable to the media. The
premise of this work was the assumption that, somewhere in the period of later
industrial capitalist development, modern societies had become ‘mass societies’.
The mass media were seen both as instruments in this evolution, and as
symptomatic of its most troubling tendencies. The ‘mass society/mass culture’
debate really goes back as far, at least, as the eighteenth century. Its terms were
first defined in the period of the rise of an urban commercial culture, interpreted
at the time as posing a threat, because of its direct dependence on cultural
production for a market, to traditional cultural values. But the debate was revived
in a peculiarly intense form at the end of the nineteenth century. It is common,
nowadays—and we agree with this view—largely to discount the terms in which
these cultural and social problems associated with the development of industrial
capitalism were debated. Nonetheless, the mass culture debate did indeed
identify a deep and qualitative shift in social relations which occurred in many
advanced industrial capitalist societies in this period. Although the nature of
these historical transformations could not be adequately grasped or properly
theorized within the terms of the ‘mass society’ thesis, these were indeed the
terms which prevailed when the ‘debate’ came to the fore again at the
commencement of what, nowadays, we would want to characterize as the
transition to monopoly forms of advanced capitalist development.
The effects which most concerned this more speculative approach can be
grouped under three rough headings. Some were defined as cultural: the
displacement, debasement and trivialization of high culture as a result of the
dissemination of the mass culture associated with the new media. Some were
defined as political: the vulnerability of the masses to the false appeals,
propaganda and influence of the media. Some were defined as social: the break-
up of community ties, of gemeinschaft, of intermediary face-to-face groups and
the exposure of the masses to the commercialized influences of élites, via the