Page 145 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

tion from the confining aspects of “live” coverage and the narrow
physical and ideological frame that mass communication provided
during those first hours after the attack. At that time, communica-
tion among individuals reasserted itself as an appropriate and com-
forting practice that drew people together, made sharing their grief
more tolerable, and corrected – at least for a while – the imbalance
between communication and mass communication that character-
izes contemporary existence. With it came a turn from the restric-
tive notion of the act as a preferred form of participation in the
world of media, for instance (which must be bought, or switched
on, and followed) to the idea of activity (which signals involvement
in the process of constructing subjective realities) as a liberating
practice among individuals.
Since then, mass communication has been used to exploit the
emotional vulnerability of society and has re-established itself as
the defining context for constructing victimhood, assigning blame,
and supporting retaliation to cultivate an unsettled social climate in
which to sell a host of ideologically determined political responses
to questions of guilt, and to promote military solutions.

XI

The problem of mass communication is its domination as a supplier
of knowledge and its pervasiveness as a producer of social and politi-
cal realities; regardless of whether one participates in the process as
viewer, reader, or listener, it becomes impossible to escape from the
effects of a mediated social existence. For many individuals, mass
communication has succeeded in transforming the world into pic-
tures, and their lives into a reflection on a television screen. The
confrontation with mass communication is a lifelong experience. It
shapes not only the discourse of society, but also the minds of indi-
viduals, who struggle with making meaning – based on knowledge
supplied by the media in order to make sense of their complex,
mediated environment – or who submit without regret to the
agenda-setting initiatives of mass communication.
Moreover, the social and political problem of mass communica-
tion is also a problem of relationships between the individual and

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