Page 131 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

news travels to its delivery points (“real news, real fast”), measured
in minutes or seconds, broadcasting recasts the idea of experience
in terms of subjective time. Consequently, listening, watching, or
reading practices are informed by the time- and space-conscious
nature of the process of mass communication; they affect under-
standings of duration or permanence and change. For instance, the
24-hour news cycles and the constant reminders of “breaking news”
or “news alerts” by cable channels, the pace of news presentations,
including the brevity and frequent intercutting of individual news
items, the American montage of feature films or television series,
together with contractions of geographical space with quick
switches from coast to coast, or from continent to continent, are
among the constitutive elements of a modern, accelerated spatio-
temporal framework of social existence that is increasingly ahistor-
ical and nomadic.Thus, people exist among the fragments of places
and ideas that are offered reassuringly by mass communication as
objective realities.
Speed upsets the balance between the space- and time-binding
media, with considerable consequences for the survival of a culture.
The privileging of space-binding – for instance with the aid of
broadcasting media – serves mostly administrative purposes of social
(and political) control through the production and dissemination of
information. But when this occurs at the expense of the time-
binding functions of print media, historical consciousness suffers,
with the neglect of literature – and intellectual expression in general
– whose contributions rely less on exploiting new technologies of
mass communication and more on a contemplative mood and the
art of reflection. A well-tempered process of mass communication
in a democratic society not only reflects the balance between the
immediacy of information-processing and the reach of historical
knowledge, but must insist on the presence of both dimensions for
the long-term benefits of a culture.
Nowadays the individual is confronted with a process of mass
communication that incorporates and perpetuates a technological
vision of communication; it builds on the speed of transfer and dis-
semination rather than on the need for understanding, and prefers
the fragmentation of information to the integrity of explanation.
Thus, newspapers carry shorter stories, newscasts contain items of

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