Page 106 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

to dialogue, and a willingness to learn from cooperation. It is also
a human achievement, which relies on the ability to communicate
and to share experiences.
Since communication is a process, or a way of life, as Raymond
Williams suggests, it bears the essence of being human. It is also
a resplendent course through mind and soul, inclusive of facts and
fictions, open to the world of the other, and to risk and failure for
the sake of experience. Indeed, communication is the experience of
life, which means it is also based on the human qualities of inti-
macy, voice, and understanding that come with a shared existence.
Mass communication, on the other hand, reinvents these essential
traits, constructs substitute happenings, and fashions itself as human
agency. In fact, it claims the total individual while it is the essence
of inauthenticity, and its inescapable centralizing function promotes
generalization, denies diversity, rejects individuality, and, in the
process, silences the sound of communication.
Mass communication cannot exist with the ambiguity of subjects
or events; it also tends to categorize the extraordinary as the normal
and prefers the present to the past, or immediacy to history. Its con-
struction of current events, however ideologically tainted, becomes
the object of historical inquiry, where it rises once more to the
status of “fact” or “reality,” despite misgivings about the course of
journalism through time and place, for instance, and the production
of information as knowledge by special interests. The influence of
mass communication reaches across the impact of the day’s news to
affect considerations of people and events beyond the grasp of their
contemporaries.

II

Knowledge and concern regarding the effects of mass communica-
tion – individually and collectively – have been around for as long
as the media have made a significant difference in the life of society.
They have been based on the myth of writing – the pen is might-
ier than the sword – and on its operationalization through propa-
ganda efforts that have activated media at various points in history,
particularly when social or political change has been feared or

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