Page 23 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

misled. In fact, Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” provides a
theoretical context for a culture of consumption from which mass
communication emerges as both process and outcome of a conver-
sion, which replaces the object with an image that becomes reality
and message simultaneously.
The discourse of reproduction at the center of mass communi-
cation, which materializes in the practice of representation, is also
characterized by the inauthenticity of the process. For instance, the
technical progress of the means of mass communication reduces dis-
tances between cultural producers and their audiences by produc-
ing encounters that fake a comfortable proximity between the
consciousness of alienation and the experience of participation. But
mass communication cannot solve basic human problems and
merely reflects and solidifies the ambiguities of media-controlled
forms of social and political authority. The possibilities of the self
and the discovery of an authentic discourse remain hidden beyond
the articulations of mass communication.
By the 1920s mass communication had become a worldwide
phenomenon that helped create the contemporary face of a global
environment. Pictures and sound became the ultimate building
blocks of a mass-mediated reality that would shape the social and
political landscape of modern societies.Their presence gives realism
a place in the arsenal of mass communication strategies to gain cred-
ibility with representations of the “real” world. Beginning in the
1980s, the internet responded to the need to reach beyond the
effectiveness of mass mediation. It drew large numbers of people
into a web of commercial activities of global proportions by appeal-
ing to individual initiative and freedom of choice.This is not a mass
communication “revolution,” however, like the invention of the
printing press, or the birth of a visual culture, which privileges the
eye, as when photography and film came into societal use early in
the twentieth century. Rather, it extends the availability of infor-
mation, or data, to individuals with interests and capabilities to
conduct independent research and draw their own conclusions.
In the meantime, the continuing growth of society – in the
United States and elsewhere – had popularized the idea of “mass
society” as a descriptive characteristic of processes of industrializa-
tion, urbanization, and modernization, which increasingly modified

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