Page 30 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

the success of the printing press, the advancement of postal services,
the rise of literacy, and the spread of knowledge through universi-
ties and academies of science.There was also a new curiosity about
the world, which promoted travel and encouraged journalism.
Together, these developments signal the beginning of rationalization
and commercialization, based on the powerful if not persuasive
merger of capital and technology, which brought about a shift in
thinking about production and consumption.These signs of progress
were accompanied over time by critical analyses of contemporaries
such as Comte, Marx, and Weber, among others, who focus on the
process of centralization and the forging of modern societies at
the expense of individual existence and cultural integrity. In fact,
the centralization of power, accomplished by the annihilation of
space and time, has always relied on the available means of com-
munication – including transportation. There has been, then, since
the earliest times, a conspiracy of ideological power and technolog-
ical speed, which has helped determine the contemporary role of
mass communication in the expansion and reinforcement of politi-
cal or economic authority.
More specifically, the struggle for freedom of the press, and the
protection of ideas circulating in books or pamphlets, were part
of a struggle for the liberation of bourgeois claims amidst the
transition from feudal to capitalist societies. Mass communication
was instrumental in the growth of a bourgeois society with the lib-
erating potential of education. At the same time, mass communica-
tion served political and economic goals to control and direct the
fate of society. In either case, its working context was culture, in
which mass communication helped reproduce the desire for
freedom and happiness (promesse de bonheur) through cultural outlets
ranging from poetry and fiction to philosophical tracts and politi-
cal treatises.
The rise of a modern civilization with the presence of pamphlets,
books, and newspapers, for instance, revealed itself with the passage
of a class society into the industrial age.The unfolding of a cultural
history in Western societies begins with European elites, their acqui-
sition of intellectual tastes and articulation of class standards, and
ends with universal education and widespread access to the stream
of mass communication, initially provided by journalism and liter-

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