Page 102 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

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Mass Communication and the

Meaning of Self in Society

The uses of mass communication in the lives of individuals are a
major social and political concern; indeed, the media are important
sources of knowledge for understanding the world as a practical
reality beyond the customary dreams of mass communication as a
collaborative force in the making of a participatory democracy.
Instead, the process of mass communication emerges as a construc-
tive force, limited however, by its own interests and prejudices as
well as by the degree of intellectual or creative power among indi-
viduals as spectators, whose successful intervention in the flow of
mass communication introduces ideologically diverse world views.
If language is, as Martin Heidegger argues, the dimension in which
human life moves, then mass communication is its technological
extension, which supplies a working vision of reality that is histor-
ically grounded in its own narrative. To be sure, such a reality is
always a representation of knowledge about the world, constructed
under specific social, economic, or political conditions, employed for
effect, and shared at a concrete historical moment for specific pur-
poses by the dominant order.

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Mass communication in its modern version is an utterly American
idea. It is conceived to secure the prospect of social control with a