Page 128 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

The presence of mass communication in social relations, and its
effects on the production of public knowledge also touch on con-
structions of time (or speed) and space; the latter are intuitions,
according to Albert Einstein, that have become part of a social or
cultural consciousness.The invention of photography, and of film as
an extension of photography, is not only the historical moment
marking the social awareness of a technology capable of reproduc-
ing the objective reality of the world – André Bazin calls film the
art of reality – but also the start of a race to achieve instanta-
neousness by collapsing time, and to conquer space by reducing dis-
tance, with the aid of shutter speeds and long lenses respectively.
The result is an enduring fiction that dominates subjective and
objective perspectives on the world.
Mass communication forms an alliance with time and subjugates
the narratives of knowledge to the dictates of speed. Ever since the
shutter speed of the camera or the speed of the rotary press revealed
new ways of capturing and preserving the moment, the technology
of mass communication has continued to determine the pace of
reproducing reality, with specific consequences for media content
and effect.Thus, the leisurely pursuit of ideas in books or pamphlets
has succumbed to the convenience of immediacy with the arrival
of periodical literature – including newspapers with their new
economy of space – only to capitulate finally to the possibilities of
speed with the rise of electronic media.
In fact, time becomes arbitrary, from the pages of the novel to
the film or television screen, when days can be compressed into a
few sentences or seconds, while minutes can be stretched to last
throughout an entire work, as in Joyce’s Ulysses, which captures
a day, or Godard’s and Gorin’s film Letter to Jane, which takes 45
minutes to analyze a single photograph of Jane Fonda in Hanoi.
Likewise, the sequential nature of time, prevalent in printed narra-
tives, is overcome by film or television, which may cut back and
forth between concurrent actions and thus compile a more complex
understanding of time, or relations between past and present. Even
film techniques like slow or accelerated motion, or still photographs,
are signifiers of the movement of time; their combination offers yet
another experience of the arbitrariness of the moment.

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