Page 24 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

the social order as social control became centralized in bureaucratic
practices. The latter, however, contained the possibility of breeding
totalitarian tendencies to contaminate democratically conceived
institutions of public communication, for instance – and in the pres-
ence of effective totalitarian regimes elsewhere. Edward Shils once
observed that the availability of mass media is an invitation to their
demagogic use. Especially after 1945 – with lessons learned from
Nazi propaganda campaigns – individuals became susceptible to
mobilization and control through mass communication, as the new
sense of being was increasingly defined in terms of alienation,
anonymity, or mobility. It was a time when “mass culture,” charac-
terized by the “mass production” of standardized products for “mass
markets,” appropriated the process of “mass communication” in a
general trend of massification – which actually began centuries ago
with the operation of the printing press.
These terms locate the idea of mass communication in a capi-
talist society under conditions of centralization and mass produc-
tion, which include not only products but also consumers or
audiences. At a time when the notion of “mass” indicated condi-
tions of change, characterizing social or political movements or
activities of societies – from socialism or capitalism to scales of pro-
duction and consumption with their respective ideological implica-
tions – the term mass communication acquired its social scientific
meaning of serving large numbers of people. Indeed, it was the
movement of information to pander to large and diverse audiences
that was to distinguish mass communication from earlier forms of
social communication, when publics were not considered markets
and appeared less heterogeneous and less dispersed. In addition, mass
communication implies a one-way process of communication that
reinforces the power of media institutions – or of those who own
or control them – to set agendas for a society which relies increas-
ingly on fewer sources of mediation for more of its social
knowledge.
The latter development contains the potential for totalitarian
practices – identified by specific visions of mass society – which
threaten democratic notions of communication based on freedom
and individualism, and assign the phenomenon of mass communi-
cation to general processes of mass society. References to “mass” –

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