Page 124 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Image 107

kinds—from illustrated tracts to panoramas, lithographs, lantern slides, and
early film—demonstrates a highly mediated, market-friendly Christianity
that saw little reason to indulge in other-worldly asceticism.

Public opinion and visual persuasion

The ubiquity and mass appeal of modern visual media such as film and the
widely shared notion that images constituted a medium of thought informed
the pivotal work of Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922), which James
Carey rightly considered “the founding book in American media studies”
(Carey 1989: 75). Having seen the use and effect of propaganda during the
First World War, Lippmann was deeply concerned about the prospect of
democracy faltering in mass-mediated society (Steel 1980: 171). He agreed
with Socrates that the human mind relies on images to think, and at its own
peril. However, modernity had plunged human society into an even more
precarious epistemological condition.

Modern life [Lippmann wrote] is hurried and multifarious….There is
neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice
a trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by
means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads.
(Lippmann 1922: 89)

Stereotypes, like the common opinions (doxa) that Socrates incessantly
targeted for overturning in his argumentative quest for genuine knowledge
(episteme), are the traffic of daily thought and the basis of public opinion.
Stereotypes are mental pictures distributed with ceremonial observance in
schools, churches, films, and newspapers, and they form the body of sacred
symbols, images, and devotions that constitute nationality, “without which,”
Lippmann asserted, the individual “is unthinkable to himself” (Lippmann
1922: 235).
Modern public opinion consists of the mass-mediated circulation of
stereotypes that simplified the real world, reducing it to easily transmitted
and assimilated formulae that appealed to people by exercising their minds
in familiar plots such as good versus evil. Modern citizens were impelled
to consume films in passionate identification with characters (Lippmann
1922: 95, 163). The large audiences of modern society, he judged, “are
more interested in themselves than in anything in the world. The selves in
which they are interested are the selves that have been revealed by schools
and by tradition” (Lippmann 1922: 168). These institutions and ideological
formations were the culture that supplied the mass-mediated language that
predetermined what people saw. And what they saw was directly related