Page 36 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

such as food, clothing, and shelter. Indeed, advertising encourages
waste and hastens obsolescence by identifying products with per-
sonal aspirations; obsolescence also works against the quality of
products and, ultimately, against the quality of work.
Advertising is also a pursuit of realism as a form of expression
and, therefore, a search for a universal language – like photography
or visual imagery, for instance – to help shape the process of mass
communication and to maximize desired responses. In its ever-
present manifestations – which interrupt print narratives, cut
through the flow of aural or visual information, or dissect the
cityscape – advertising creates a two-dimensional reality, in which
familiar dichotomies (such as new/old, improved/not improved,
extra/normal) mark the boundaries of consumer choice. In doing
so, advertising reveals the contrast between the complex, destabiliz-
ing conditions of a contemporary existence and the mythology of
an easy life between two options with a highly predictable outcome.
The choice, however, becomes problematic when expectations of
a manufactured consumer reality turn into real demands for a better
existence. Even worse, the result is frustration among those addicted
to a make-believe world of advertising, who may well be aware of
the differences between their own economic or social reality and
the fiction of advertising, but refuse to abandon the myth of con-
sumption as redemption, which is reinforced by a constant and
repetitive stream of mass communication. Indeed, mass communi-
cation and advertising are technically and economically merged, as
Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno conclude after considering
the pervasiveness of advertising in 1940s America. They see adver-
tising and mass communication join in the mechanical repetition of
consumer products and call advertising a negative principle and a
blocking device, because whatever does not bear its stamp is eco-
nomically suspect.
This intimate relationship between advertising and American
culture is founded on the commercialization of mass communica-
tion, which began during the nineteenth century as a formless, ir-
responsible, and unregulated activity. Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote
in 1909 that advertising has a thousand principles, one purpose,
and no morals, and a contemporary that to discover the truth of an

24