Page 104 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

individuals.After all, the encounter with mass communication is also
a private or personal experience that involves ways of receiving
information and knowledge for the construction, adaptation, or
conversion of meaning.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, almost three gen-
erations have grown up in a mass-mediated environment, which
defines their lifeworld and provides the intellectual and emotional
context for an understanding of their social and political existence.
The resulting relationship between the individual and mass com-
munication raises questions about the nature of reality, freedom, and
control over the prospects for an authentic life; it also problematizes
the discovery of the self in the process of mass communication, since
its permanent presence in people’s daily lives has masked the poten-
tial for social communication successfully and in a totalizing manner.
Thus, when the spoken word yields to transcription and preserva-
tion as text, and speech becomes not only frozen but disembodied
in the flow of mass communication, information is lost and know-
ledge cannot be recovered. Colin Cherry once talked about worlds
in a wink, and he meant the potential richness of face-to-face
encounters.
Moreover, mass communication – as it turns out – may be a
deceptive practice, whose truth claims are not a matter of know-
ledge and interest, but of faith in the act of representation itself.
Seductive in its simplicity, artful in its construction, and even con-
venient in its ability to control through force of habit and persua-
sion, mass communication is the choice of the powerful with access
to the world of media.The idea that freedom of the press exists for
those who own it is a classic comment, not only on the preroga-
tives of ownership, but also on the mediation of the social or politi-
cal order under which people live and die.
The sense of communication, which is the foundation of an
authentic existence, has changed to include the presence of the
media, reflecting the institutional forces of society and resulting in
a rapidly disappearing private realm. Communication is no longer
communion, as John Dewey would have had us believe earlier in
the twentieth century, but rather responsiveness to sophisticated
strategies of economic and political interests in the public realm.
These strategies rely confidently on the lifelong process of social-

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