Page 130 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

depends on the cultural or social specificity of the respective bound-
aries; the latter have been redrawn in the course of a history of
increasing demands by the media for expansion into the territory
of the private with arguments that their need to know – in the
interest of public enlightenment – outweighs the individual’s desire
to be left alone. By and large the media have succeeded in over-
riding social or cultural concerns, not least because of the pressures
of prurient interest, the promise of commercial gain, and the success
of a journalism of exposure. Privacy, once a privilege of kings, has
become a franchise of the mass media, which rule the definitions
of its boundaries, while publicness, once the condition of democ-
racy, has been reduced to an exercise of publicity.
But beyond strategic considerations of social space, issues of time,
in particular, have gained new importance with the celebration of
speed as a modern (or postmodern) contribution of technology to
the field of mass communication. It manifests itself in the rise of
computers with a new sense of time and speed.The result is a con-
suming, if not perverse, insistence on raising the quality of life by
improving the power of operating systems by tenths of a second.
But the preoccupation with speed is much older and seems inher-
ent in the development of communication technologies, beginning
with faster printing presses and continuing with the speed of the
telegraph and the electronic broadcasting delivery systems for
making mass communication increasingly instantaneous – and there-
fore popular. Those technologies have also reoriented individuals
towards notions of space and time by undermining patience and
encouraging rupture or discontinuity, especially with the increasing
speed of technological development itself during the last 20 years.
Thus, there were 500 years between the invention of the printing
press and the rise of photography, a few years between the employ-
ment of photography and the development of film and broadcast-
ing, a couple of decades from this to the emergence of television,
and only a generation until the arrival of satellite and computer
technologies, whose expansion has become a continuous celebra-
tion of speed.
Indeed, speed dominates contemporary conceptualizations of
mass communication as a determinant of its success, but it also dic-
tates how individuals perceive the world.When it matters how fast

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