Page 27 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

Thus, the definition of mass communication as technology
focuses on the process of rationalization – the effective transfer of
social communication into the realm of mass media – and the effects
of individuation – the fragmentation of traditional communities that
comes with the isolation of the individual as reader, viewer, or lis-
tener in the system of mass communication.At the same time, media
technology represents a set of societal norms whose effectiveness
depends on the degree of internalization of the idea of mass com-
munication in a particular cultural setting.
The term “mass communication” itself was allegedly coined by
Harold Lasswell in the early 1940s in the context of government
work related to propaganda activities during World War II. Since
then, the nature and function of mass communication has occupied
US social sciences as a process and in the context of a larger pro-
gressive agenda regarding the nature of democracy and the need for
social control in a society of immigrants. Mass communication –
unlike the concept of mass society – had not been considered an
ideological construct, involving the construction of audiences, com-
munication experiences, and communicators, as well as availability,
cost efficiency, and appeal to the masses in a larger, political sense.
But its impact on society, although contested in its details, became
a foregone conclusion, backed by an age-old belief in the persua-
sive power of the (printed) word and confirmed by the increasingly
technological sophistication of the means of communication; they
enjoy a widespread reception as powerful sources of persuasion.
An appropriate functional description of the process, according
to Wilbur Schramm, an early promoter of mass communication as
an academic discipline, is mass communication “acting as society
communicating,” which involves institutional sources (media) and
destinations (individuals or groups in society) as well as effects, or
the specific uses made of messages. It is an approach to a definition
that has dominated traditional media research with an emphasis on
the large-scale, one-directional, and asymmetrical nature of mass
communication as a social process.
Subsequent definitions, however, remain decontextualized and
ahistorical statements of the roles or functions of mass communica-
tion; they are not the result of a genealogy of communication as
a cultural (or historical) phenomenon with specific roots in a

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