Page 103 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

focus on the process of socialization, the method of mediation, and
the circumstances under which effects can be achieved. In addition,
it is useful, fast, and efficient, but also versatile, typically operating
in the present, and open to social scientific scrutiny. As such it
reflects the American experience of a world that is knowable and,
for that reason, conquerable.
Mass communication also belongs to the vocabulary of the
American century, like freedom and democracy, where it constitutes
the most popular synonym for the current conditions of modernity,
joined by terms like mass culture, mass society, or mass market
and buttressed by the principles of mass production and mass con-
sumption. It is a twentieth-century concept with obscure origins
and applied beyond academic circles by a public awakening to the
consequences of a technology-driven modern existence.The idea of
mass communication certainly attracted public interest before the
celebrated alliance between democracy and technology showed signs
of exhaustion, and the novelty of urban thrills and suburban bliss
had turned into an alienating experience for a growing number of
individuals.
When notions of wealth rather than welfare direct the long march
of society towards capitalism, casualties are left in its path, accord-
ing to keen observers of twentieth-century society. For instance,
Erich Fromm’s or David Riesman’s classic laments include the
complicity of mass communication in the conditioning of modern
society. Ideologically compatible in its predominant forms, and
therefore rarely subversive, mass communication is seen to help
create consensus or compliance through diversion.The initial duality
of generating accounts of reality involving the media and expert
narratives, for example governmental or scientific authorities, is
being collapsed into a single system of generating public or social
knowledge through an economically inspired collaboration of shared
political interests.The latter range from the widespread use of public
relations materials emanating from business and government to a
centralization of information sources.
This essay, in particular, shifts from institutional manifestations of
mass communication to its reception by individuals, or from the
external circumstances of social or political conditions to internal
matters of shaping an understanding of reality in the minds of

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