Page 39 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

a search for truth and to a scientific perspective on the world. The
eternal search for truth becomes a scientific challenge, or as Herbert
Marcuse concludes – after analyzing Max Weber’s work – truth
becomes criticism, which turns into accusation and becomes the
focus of scientific inquiry.
Mass communication, from its beginnings, has been associated
with the production and dissemination of social knowledge, that is,
with a form of pragmatic knowledge that pertains to what people
accept as real. Consequently, the social world attains its meaning
through different interpretations of common experiences, arising
from ideological perspectives, such as political, cultural, generational,
or class differences.According to Karl Marx (and other classical soci-
ologists) social knowledge is significantly influenced by the pre-
dominant forms of social organization, whose prevailing ideas are
grounded in a collaboration of social scientific, political, and edu-
cational forces and rely on the process of mass communication to
help reinforce the ideological thrust of a particular world view.
These observations corroborate current engagements of mass com-
munication and the production of what we know about the world.
Mass communication helps introduce, popularize, and reinforce
specific versions of a social reality that is consensual by design as it
sets the social or cultural agenda under the influence of a given
economic and political order.
But since human knowledge, as Ernst Cassirer reminds us, is
comprised of symbolic knowledge, the arising notions of meaning
and meaning-making direct our attention to the territory of culture,
where individual agency reproduces a social world that reflects, not
a static or objective reality, but rather a particular ideologically deter-
mined actuality. More specifically, a critical conceptualization of
social knowledge, according to Jürgen Habermas, must differentiate
between “technical” and “practical” knowledge.Thus, the purposive-
rational action of capitalism stresses the technical and marginalizes
the capacity for communicative action which involves issues of
human conduct. The manifestation of technical knowledge in the
institutional framework of mass communication refers either to
decisions regarding rules of conduct or to instrumental action to
help organize the appropriate means of controlling the idea of mass
communication.

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