Page 25 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

which began with Herbert Blumer’s recognition (in 1939) of a new
type of social formation, beyond group, crowd, or public – for
example, also lend a specific character to the manner of communi-
cation, to the way of reaching large numbers of individuals, or to
the character of the audience itself.
More specifically, mass movements of modern times – if one
thinks of fascism, communism, or Nazism, in particular – have
sought total political control over society with the help of intellec-
tual elites and their expertise and access to mass communication.
Contemporary pluralist societies also manage the masses – some-
times identified as assemblies of unqualified individuals – with the
aid of mass communication produced by an expert minority. In
either case, elites organize and determine the nature of society, intro-
duce their renditions of democracy and its practices, and reproduce
their versions of reality with the help of mass communication.
Indeed, mass communication and the notion of the masses are inter-
dependent ways of denying individual autonomy through strategies
of separating people from themselves.
What differentiates totalitarian from democratic uses of mass
communication is the degree of participation and access to the
means of mass communication available to the general public, as
well as the degree of freedom of speech and press that accompa-
nies mass communication practices. Unless, that is, we have reached
a point – as Albert Camus once feared – where such a freedom
either depends exclusively on the power of government or the
power of money.
There is a curious connection between the rise of mass com-
munication – which incorporates the historical growth of media
industries – and the emergence of the totalitarian properties of mass
society in the conduct of a democratically conceived process of mass
communication.Thus, an increasingly atomized society conceives of
producing communication practices that create a pseudo-pluralism
of voices in pseudo-communities with mass communication pro-
cesses that are centrally determined and, therefore, jeopardize the
workings of a participatory democracy.
Mass communication in capitalist societies is the voice of a cor-
porate age, which simulates the presence of communal ties and
the possibility of shared experiences for the masses. More likely,

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