Page 26 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

however, is the general practice of subjugating individual interests,
cultural preferences, or ideological differences to a leveling process
that encourages consensus and guarantees compliance among large
numbers of individuals. While mass communication may originally
have been conceived by society as a way of gathering, producing,
and disseminating information (or sharing entertainment) – and in
this sense as a communal activity – it has subsequently been appro-
priated for private profit or political control, suggesting a significant
change in the nature of earlier understandings of mass communi-
cation. In either case, mass communication appears as a force for
integration, positively through assimilation into a common culture
and negatively through hegemonic practices of incorporation.
The emerging definition of mass communication, then, extends
beyond traditional considerations, which have been inspired by a
social scientific focus on the objective properties of mass commu-
nication without addressing the historical conditions of societal
communication that have ultimately resulted in alienating and anti-
democratic practices.
A clue to an understanding of the complex, economic nature of
mass communication – which invites extrapolation – has been
offered by George Gerbner’s definition, in particular, of mass com-
munication as an institutionally based mass production and distrib-
ution of a broadly shared, continuous flow of public messages. He
outlines social and economic determinants, which demand a more
complex review of the process of mass communication, without
referring directly to its ideological nature, however. The cultural,
social, and political components of mass communication constitute
a complex process that is institutionalized in media practices.
In a context of technological processes in modern society, mass
communication represents the systematic application of specialized
knowledge for the purposes of producing (or reproducing) know-
ledge and information efficiently; indeed, mass communication as
technology projects an environment for creative labor, and in its
institutionalized form becomes a constitutive force in society. Its
instrumentality produces the conditions under which human com-
munication occurs, including the reduction of dialogical relations,
for instance, and the privileging of media at the expense of
conversation.

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