Page 20 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

communication and human dialog. Since its meaning includes sig-
nificantly different practices, including the notions of “transmission”
(one-way) and “sharing” (two-way) – as well as the middle ground
of “making common” – the use of “communication” requires a
more specific reference to its intended application.
The term “mass communication,” on the other hand, has its
ideational roots in the evolution of societal communication in
Western cultures. Its long and distinguished history runs parallel to
the expansion of publicly shared information after the increasing use
of papyrus facilitated the dissemination of private and public records,
when scrolls circulated throughout the Mediterranean region, for
example, and the Roman “acta diurna” – usually accepted as the
first prototype of the newspaper – provide a source of information
about daily events never seen before 131 B.C. Paper-making
processes from China supplanted papyrus by the twelfth century,
when paper mills developed throughout Europe. Block prints pre-
ceded printing, as demand for copies of written tracts had also
increased throughout Asia, until movable type had appeared in
China, Korea, and Japan by the eleventh century – about four cen-
turies before this process emerged in Europe. Gutenberg’s subse-
quent invention became a turning point during the Renaissance
period with the liberation of the text from the manuscript age.
Indeed, the sixteenth century saw the production and dissemination
of multiple copies throughout many regions of Europe and beyond
at moderate prices, accompanied by an increasing pace of social,
cultural, and political expansion.
But the circulation of knowledge and the public use and
exchange of information would become regular features of a social
existence only with the arrival of broadsheets after 1400 – and
newssheets printed from type after 1456 – which initiated access to
ideas and availability of information to the public at large. From
1609, newspapers (Zeitungen in German; nouvelles in French) began
to appear across Europe; it was not until 1690, however, that
Benjamin Harris succeeded, with Boston’s Publick Occurrences, Both
Foreign and Domestick, in launching a newspaper outside of Europe.
The rise of the press (and the printed word) was accompanied
by the increasing prominence of the image as a tool of persuasion,
but also as a subject of theories of knowledge that focus on image

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