Page 143 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

The idea of mass communication and history rests in the capac-
ity to capture memory – as in the photograph, the video record-
ing, or the novel – when memory turns into material history and
remains embedded in individual or collective thought; there it
grounds experience and the time and place of existence and infuses
a vocabulary that speaks to issues of identity and being in the world.
Memory also constitutes the power of bringing the lessons of
history to bear on the issues of mass communication which may
confront those seeking to create a different kind of democratic
system of communication. For this reason it is important to engage
in the act of remembering purposefully, with an awareness of past
tendencies, especially when – as Leo Lowenthal observes – what is
remembered and what is forgotten are almost indistinguishable, and
purely the result of chance.

X

The coverage of the terrorist assault on Manhattan and Washington
reveals the limits of mass communication.Those limits reside in the
substance as well as in the practices of mass communication, begin-
ning with the problems of television production, specifically, and
ending with the blurred boundaries of perception between a medi-
ated reality and the reality of the disaster.
Shortly after the moment of the attack and time and again after
the initial shock, people at the scene kept saying that the television
images in their living rooms were nothing compared to the reality
on the ground. They were stunned as much by the realization that
the media had been unable to convey the reality of the events as
by the extent of the human catastrophe itself.Their presence at the
scene of the disaster revealed the poverty of mass communication.
Reduced to a mere marker of a historical event, television was
blinded by its inherent inability to absorb and reproduce its total-
ity, physically and emotionally, reducing the attempt to convey the
horror of the moment to the repetitive presentation of spectacular
images.
As a strategy of maintaining interest and drawing viewers into
the program, repetition quickly becomes an annoyance and, more

131