Page 154 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MASS SOCIETY/MASS SOCIETY THEORY

communication at all – for instance, education, religion or even
speech itself.

Further reading: McQuail (1987)

MASS SOCIETY/MASS SOCIETY THEORY

An early twentieth-century model of the social organisation of
industrial/capitalist societies which characterised them as comprising a
vast workforce of atomised, isolated individuals without traditional
bonds of locality or kinship, who were alienated from their labour by
its repetitive, unskilled tendencies and by their subjection to the
vagaries of the wage relationship (the cash nexus) and the fluctuations
of the market. Such individuals were entirely at the mercy of
. totalitarian ideologies and propaganda;
. influence by the mass media (comprising, in this period, the press,
cinema and radio).

Mass society theory was an understandable response to the economics
and politics of the 1930s, and was neatly summed up in Charlie
Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936). But it has hung on in a common-
sense version which is associated largely with cultural and literary
critics for whom industrialisation and modern society in general
remain a regrettable aberration from values and habits which these
writers fondly imagine used to prevail before the invention of
machines, democracy and the like.
Mass society theory has been active in a wide range of media
studies, where it tends to produce apocalyptic visions of what
television and cinema are doing to the masses (but never, oddly
enough, to the critic). Any time you speculate on what ‘effect’ the
media have on (other) people, especially if your thoughts turn to
notions such as dependency, aggression, narcotisation, brutalisation
and desensitisation, then you are thinking mass society theory. Don’t!
Go and watch television, and ask yourself why these things are able to
afflict others if they aren’t happening to you.
See also: Audiences, Effects, Persuasion

Further reading: Biddiss (1977); Carey, 1992; Swingewood (1977)

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