Page 151 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

reinforcement of democratic practices among individuals and their
exchange of ideas in the context of national or regional debates in
the public sphere.
Mass communication offers a historically grounded discourse of
self in society that reflects an uneven distribution of power as it
continues to move further away from serving a public with the
informed prejudice and the knowledgeable interest that character-
ize an authentic commitment to the cause of liberty.

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Mass communication in the twenty-first century is the context of
being in the world, it originates the destabilized milieu of fact and
fiction that creates the media reality in which individuals live and
die. As such, the historical process of mass communication has
broken down traditional boundaries, like those between journalism
and literature, to operate in an atmosphere of multiple knowledges
and truths.The result is a new cultural form, which is characterized
not only by intertextuality and inter-mediality, pervasiveness and
speed, but also by an assimilation of its audience.With a collapse of
the boundaries between production and consumption – or between
spectacle and spectator, when the image becomes the real, and the
real merges with the image – audiences may begin to understand
that they reside within the text of their media reality.They will rec-
ognize themselves in the mirror-image of the media, as they are the
mirror-image of media representations in their gestures, speech, and
ideologies. Media reality is the assimilation of the lifeworld through
the process of mass communication and a cultural context for acting
upon the demands of the here and now – which is the dominant
reality.
Mass communication is the postmodern version of a cultural life
that consists of a montage of meanings and knowledges of individ-
uals, who try to make sense of their own existence.They do so by
drawing on the experience of living in a media reality, which
informs the manner of their interpretation and confirms their claim
to knowledge. The search for “the” truth – although never fully
abandoned – has turned into settling for multiple possibilities, which

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