Page 29 - Decoding Culture

22 DECODING CULTURE

Mass society and media effects

It is difficult, undesirable even, to consider the mass society thesis
and the media effects tradition in isolation from one another,
since - in the USA where in the 1940s and 1950s they were given
their most elaborate expression - the one tends to presuppose the
basic assumptions of the other. Although mass society and mass
culture arguments can be traced back illuminatingly into nine­
teenth-century thought (Swingewood, 1977), in the twentieth
century they have been irrevocably bound up with claims about
new forms of mass communication. Those arguing that modern
society was becoming a mass society saw strong media effects as
the sine qua non of 'massification', while those claiming that the
media were hugely effective framed their views in the terms pro­
vided by mass society theorists. C. Wright Mills (1959: 314),
himself a leading exponent of the 'manipulative' variant of the mass
society thesis, catches this well.

(1) The media tell the man in the mass who he is - they give him
identity; (2) they tell him what he wants to be - they give him aspi­
rations; (3) they tell him how to get that way - they give him
technique; and (4) they tell him how to feel that way even when he
is not - they give him escape.

For Mills, who represents a left variation of mass society thinking,
the media enabled the power elite to exert control over increas­
ingly anonymous, passive mass-persons, with inevitable anti­
democratic consequences. Of course, there were other mass soci­
ety analysts who were less concerned with the directly political
outcomes than was Mills, but, whatever their political persuasion,
all coincided in their belief in the sheer power of media effects and
in their presumption that mass society brought with it a devalued
and restrictive mass culture.

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