Page 19 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

in consensus-building or in what Antonio Gramsci calls an expan-
sive hegemony – which serves the dominant ideology. At the same
time, as long as the idea of democracy retains its provisional quality
of being the unfinished business of the people – and of being open
to change by definition – the idea of mass communication remains
equally responsive to the will of people and their struggle for
change. After all, the development of modern media is closely
related to the historical struggle for freedom and democracy.

II

The history of mass communication (and its definition) material-
ized over several centuries from a chronicle of shifting power, when
preoccupations with control over nature are accompanied, if not
replaced, by desires to dominate individuals (or societies) through
persuasion and manipulation. It is also reflected in the turn of
science from astronomy to sociology and psychology, when language
and communication became the territory for human inquiry. This
territory expanded with the rapidly improving sophistication of
communication technologies – especially during the twentieth
century – to perfect the process of mass communication. Deeply
embedded in the cultural fabric of contemporary society, mass com-
munication defines reality and marks the boundaries of social
knowledge, authenticating its representations of the world through
public compliance and consent, if not sheer popularity.
Mass communication is the originator of a public discourse that
changed from social initiatives to institutional domination. It
borrows from the notion of communication, however, which arises
from reflections about the self, community, and the prospects of
democracy. “Communication” refers to a basic human condition,
recognized much earlier in Western philosophical works and artic-
ulated in the context of social and political thought throughout
Western history, with a contemporary meaning that harks back to
the fifteenth century. Referring to the process of “making
common,” the term has been applied (as a noun) to a wide variety
of practices that establish commonality, from road- or waterways,
and telegraph and telephone connections to institutional forms of

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