Page 18 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

to a new understanding of fact and truth, reshape the premise of
social knowledge, and redefine personal interests.
Consequently, participation is configured as authentication of the
dominant agendas of consumption in a world that engages indus-
trial means of mass persuasion to create self-serving realities and effi-
ciently replaces what one remembers of John Dewey’s democratic
vision of communication with references to communities of com-
pliance or consumption. The idea of sharing – which defines the
sensibility of community and perfects the practice of communica-
tion – re-enters the public sphere as manufactured consent and
commodity exchange that reflect the interests of those in control
of the marketplace of ideas. In other words, the notion of sharing
turns into a process of investing labor and capital in economic
propositions with social and political consequences that benefit
commercial interests.
At stake is the commercialization of human relations with the
assistance of mass communication. Since reality is always what
people think it is, the reality of contemporary life emerges from an
immersion in the social or cultural practices of mass communica-
tion that are tinged by commercial claims or political goals.Ways of
thinking, speaking, or seeing among individuals are the outcome of
a permanent exposure to a discourse of power in the public sphere.
Moreover, there is no social or political life – or meaningful social
practice – outside a mediated reality, which is not the result of
institutional strategies of convergence.
Henceforth, the idea of mass communication reflects the proper-
ties of mass society in its totalitarian excesses, and guides consider-
ations of culture and society that have serious consequences for an
understanding of the self and relations with others in the world.
What is rarely comprehended is the historical role of commercial
interests in the construction of social realities, including the reality
of a democratic life, in support of a specific Weltanschauung. Such
constructions are accompanied by the fading chance of recovering
the self in communication with others and of re-establishing a sense
of mass communication as a dynamic process that caters to the
public interest.
What emerges from these introductory observations is the real-
ization that mass communication is a politicized process – involved

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