Page 121 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

While the self as a social structure – and an object to itself –
arises in social experience through communication and remains
distinct from the body – as George Herbert Mead suggests – mass
communication collapses this distinction and identifies the self with
the body. By dramatizing the material conditions of being, mass
communication succeeds in extending the idea of the body as indi-
vidual identity to its audiences, whose attention is fixed on the
external dimensions of the respective media narratives. More gen-
erally, mass communication promotes awareness and knowledge of
the body; the latter serves the production of what Foucault has
called the docile bodies of the modern state by introducing for
public consumption versions of the perfect body that lead to con-
formity. In the process, considerable time and effort are spent on a
public discourse about the body, health, and good looks, which
offers models of compliance and promises happiness through
inclusion.
The enabling power of photographic technologies has helped
stage personal changes (of the body), while confirming the central-
ity of the image in the (re)production of the self as body. For
instance, an obsession with thinness has conquered the world of
design, from cars to Coca Cola bottles; it focuses on the female
body as the prototype of the liberated shape that fires the imagina-
tion of a health-conscious generation with its mania for fitness and
bodily perfection. Supported by the credibility of medical observa-
tions regarding obesity and mental health – and siding with the
social power of medical knowledge – mass communication takes
advantage of a pervasively negative self-consciousness and perpetu-
ates the craving for less – which means spending more – in adver-
tising campaigns for diet foods, diet pills, and exercise equipment in
ways that augment the visibility of the perfect body in popular
culture. In doing so, mass communication also constructs an envi-
ronment of fear and anticipation that shapes the vision of the body
as an object of desire and a material expression of personal failure
or success. Consequently, and in the accelerating process of reduc-
tion, an ideal body is the one that no longer materially exists, as
Stuart Ewen once remarked.
The image consciousness of modern society is a result of mass
communication and its relentless exploitation of people’s narcissis-

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