Page 111 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

in the context of mass communication, which is the context of
public life in a media environment. In fact, the activist tradition with
its roots in British cultural studies continues to offer an alternative
vision of mass communication research not as administrative re-
search in the interest of commerce or politics, but as a form of social
criticism that enables the liberation of the individual from the cold
embrace of mass society theories. In this sense, it is a theoretical
approach that encourages the individual to become active and to
make a difference in opposing oppressive manifestations of mass
communication that threaten democratic forms of social practice.
It is also worth remembering in these paradigmatic shifts to a
critical position how little was accomplished by traditional social
scientific studies of mass communication during the last century.
Much of what is known today about the role and function of the
media, for instance – or the notion of effects, in particular, and the
process of mass communication in society in general – has been
understood (and discussed) for centuries by generations of intellec-
tuals, whose creative insights quickly revealed the workings of any
(new) cultural phenomenon in their midst, from pre-Socratic
rhetorical scholarship to nineteenth-century thought about the
political economy of the German press, for example. In the mean-
time, social scientific analyses have steadily accumulated to bolster
an already considerable body of findings concerning the impact of
mass communication without producing a new theoretical under-
standing of its workings in society. Consequently, when it comes
to theorizing media and society, the social scientific study of mass
communication remains complementary or additional at best, and
fragmented or without context at worst.

III

Individual encounters with the manufacture of reality reveal the
themes or stereotypes of media practices that fashion the experi-
ence of everyday life in an environment that looks and sounds
familiar enough without being the “real thing”; the latter remains
the personal experience of being in the world with others.The dif-
ferences between a mass-mediated reality and the reality of personal

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