Page 11 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Preface

cultural practices, as in the work of Raymond Williams or Stuart
Hall, to the crisis of representation and production, as noted by Jean
Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, among others. A postmodern view
of mass communication, in particular, contains the destabilized hier-
archies of fact/fiction, objectivity/subjectivity, and truth/falsehood;
it introduces a process of de-differentiation and leaves individuals to
deal with the consequences of facing multiple meanings, know-
ledges, and truths.
The essay draws on these challenges to the popular, historical
knowledge of mass communication to address the specter of an
ideologically constructed media reality, which defines democratic
institutions, and whose impact on the lifeworld of the social self is
based on the construction of myths by the dominant economic and
political order. Such a media reality, to paraphrase Ernst Cassirer, is
given to us at the outset in definite forms of pure expression that
flow from the presence of mass communication in everyday life.The
essay is thematically organized to address the relations of mass com-
munication to self and society, respectively. To increase readability
and to aid the flow of ideas, traditional notes and references have
been dispensed with in favor of short quotes or paraphrased mate-
rial; the curious reader is referred to the bibliography for the work
of the respective authors.
Book projects are never just solitary intellectual ventures, but rely
on the efforts of many individuals. I wish to thank Jayne Fargnoli
of Blackwell’s, who suggested this project, for the opportunity to
formally consider the working reality of mass communication, and
Janet Moth for her expert editorial assistance. I benefited from the
critical readings of earlier drafts by Bonnie Brennen, Ed McLuskie,
Peter Robinson, and Vida Zei as well as from the detailed com-
ments of one anonymous reviewer.And I am grateful to the Faculty
of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) for its
continuing support of my work.

Hanno Hardt
Ljubljana/Iowa City
November 2003

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