Page 149 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

cifications.There is a market even for oppositional ideas, which are
ultimately embraced by the dominant forces in the realm of media
practices. This process shapes the boundaries of the social and cul-
tural realities that determine individuals and their outlook on the
world.
Mass communication, in other words, creates the conditions –
and provides the knowledge – under which people live, judge their
environment, and make choices that determine their future. The
experts of Lippmann’s complex world, who were to be the guides
through the maze of facts and figures, finding truth and avoiding
falsehood, are now in charge. But instead of working for the public
good they serve those in control of the means of mass communi-
cation, who ask the questions and determine the agenda.
Mass communication has accompanied the rise of Western civi-
lization with increasing technological sophistication that has kept
pace with the scientific advances of society.Those advances have led
to the domination of a technological rationale that has engaged the
means of mass communication to secure the functioning of the soci-
etal apparatus. Thus, ideas of community, democracy, or freedom
have been employed in the service of an ideology that grounds mass
communication in the dominant politico-economic order. Indeed,
after centuries of exposure to the ideas of democracy (and individ-
ual liberty), it still seems that the beliefs and institutions of democ-
racy have never become fully separated from commercial interests,
from where they developed, as Reinhold Niebuhr suggested in the
1930s. Mass communication legitimates their power and opera-
tionalizes claims of social integration with confidence in a flow of
mass communication that shapes the “objective” reality which deter-
mines the discourse of society.
Such a flow, however, is determined by a lack of choice, and by
excess, and imbalance, which characterize the historical develop-
ment of mass communication.The challenge of a cultural policy of
choice, liberated from the adverse social and economic conditions
affecting too many people, remains a limited individual option. For
instance, instead of reinforcing the idea of reading – a flourishing
practice of past civilizations – which confirms the status of the
book, and the arts in general, as sources of knowledge, there is

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