Page 43 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

cratic principles; they pointed to the role of a free press, the rise of
public opinion, and individual freedom to choose in a marketplace
of ideas.
Indeed, mass communication as a technology of dissemination
accommodated expanding demands for knowledge in an increas-
ingly complex world, which, in turn, created a need for more
markets and encouraged specialization.At the start of the nineteenth
century, media had become sufficiently equipped to help advance
the cause of journalism as a popularizer of ideas and entertainer of
the masses with a creative mix of fact and fiction that found its way
into information and opinion. Habermas speaks of the bourgeois
public sphere, which emerged earlier from a new social order, based
on the need for information regarding commerce – and capitalism
in general – and the rise of the social as an expression of mutual
dependence in the public realm.With this also came an increase in
confidence in the judgment of common people, or faith in ratio-
nalism, which is an acknowledgment of the idea of public opinion
as an expression of an enlightened mass. The term was actually
coined in the late eighteenth century with the growth of popula-
tions in urban centers, the increase in literacy, and the development
of mass communication, that is, the duplication and circulation of
large numbers of pamphlets or posters. However, the opinion
process actually emerged in the fifteenth century, after the intro-
duction of printing and with the Reformation, which not only
questioned clerical authority, but signaled a widespread concern
over religious issues, political changes, and the spread of ideologies
of progress.
Indeed, the notion of public opinion signaled the arrival of a new
authority. Celebrated by some (Bryce) and denounced by others
(Marx), the idea of public opinion became a manifestation of an
individual’s social or political presence in the public realm. Ferdi-
nand Tönnies spoke about public opinion as the expression of a
public will and considered the press a manufacturer of opinions and
an indispensable “printed marketplace.” He joined others, such as
Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon, who also addressed the idea of
public opinion in the context of European urbanization and indus-
trialization to reserve its place in the conceptualization of a demo-
cratic society.

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