Page 29 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

raises questions about the most rational – that is, accountable and
regulated – control over mass communication to secure a democ-
ratic existence.
Finally, there is the notion of defining by doing, which introduces
a personal dimension to a search for meanings of mass communi-
cation that escapes any institutionally grounded, historical claim to
a definition, since it is identified with particular choices of respec-
tive users. What emerges from such an approach is a litany of
individual preferences that range from bourgeois self-interest in per-
petuating or preserving specific social or political conditions to the
interests of the oppressed or marginalized, whose own choices vary
with the details of their oppositional stance.
In any case, these defining instances of media functions also
include the creative applications by a public who may be more
interested in background noise, moving color images, or wrapping-
paper – among other self-defined objectives – than in the actual
reception of information or entertainment, for instance. Although
far removed from any original intent of their producers, these media
uses do occur, and their histories need to be written for cultural
balance in traditional versions of mass communication history which
typically celebrate the process of production rather than the manner
of consumption and, thus, favor an institutional rather than an indi-
vidual biography.

III

Indeed, while mass communication figures prominently in the his-
tory of cultural evolution and social advancement, it is not entirely
a story of betterment or progress, nor is it one in which progress
is an entirely Western achievement. Instead, it is the story of a uni-
versal struggle, in which communication in its technical manifesta-
tion is the outcome of creative labor in many parts of the world,
albeit more often than not for similar purposes of social or politi-
cal control through propaganda and advertising.
The emergence of mass communication from the depths of
fifteenth-century Europe was a slow and deliberate process – after

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