Page 123 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

setting, mass communication intervenes with a reproduction of the
social experience and a construction of identity that replaces mutual
recognition with an assignment of roles and norms. The other-
directedness, which David Riesman describes as a characteristic of
modernity, and which depends on the presence of others, engages
the discourse of mass communication for recognition and defini-
tion of personal identity. Mass communication reproduces a sense
of community with references to a familiar symbolic environment,
which appeals to personal needs for securing one’s identity – or
creating a new one – and protecting its fragility through extended
exposure to repetitive representations of roles, gender models, or
conditions of existence.Thus, the notion of standing within a social
order, which characterizes the traditional idea of identity, is replaced
by standing in an imagined and mediated community of social or
political stereotypes. Communication, which involves participation
in the other and which requires the appearance of the other in
the self, as George Herbert Mead reminds us, is replaced by mass
communication, which involves an enlistment of the individual as
audience for purposes of identification with products and ideas.
The concomitant routines of mediating reality – which are always
ideologically informed – result in an understanding of social rela-
tions, culture, and the social and political world in an atmosphere
in which conversation is replaced by instruction, and human com-
panionship by an institutional presence. Human agency, in this case,
involves a developing awareness of a mediated object world through
which self-awareness is formed. In addition, the industrial con-
struction of the other (which is always a fabrication) – and the
concurrent realization of the self – which combine the need for
efficiency with a desire for maximum effect, are typically directed
at audiences as individuals, while signaling the decentering of the
personal with mass appeals for identification with objects of mass
production. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “democratic individual-
ism” disappears in a process of mass communication, in which self-
hood emerges from a collective exposure to mediated realities that
are void of discursive possibilities, that is, when conversation has
ceased to be the source of individual self-constitution, and collec-
tive identities arise out of compliance rather than opposition and
resistance.

111