Page 47 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

The industrialization of mass communication began with the
demise of an artisan culture – the printer as intellectual worker –
and ended with the centralized production of books and movies,
for example on America’s East Coast and in Hollywood and New
York, respectively. For instance, the widespread use of merchandiz-
ing catalogs in the acculturation of new and old immigrants – a
sign of access to distant communities – signaled the imminent death
of an autonomous local culture, while the rotary press, telephone,
and typewriter created new forms of domination.Those who owned
and applied these means of communication subjugated others,
including journalists and printers, to industrial technologies of pro-
duction and dissemination.The subsequent dependencies, accompa-
nied by a division of labor, relegated journalists to wage laborers
and shifted claims of press freedom from intellectual workers to
ownership. George Gerbner’s phrase that the media are “the cultural
arms of the industrial order from which they spring” is an apt
description of these developments. In a society where the means of
mass communication are manufacturing plants of cultural goods, the
idea of work becomes central to an understanding of the modern
artist or journalist as worker hovering over the conveyor belt of a
culture industry. Creative, intellectual work turns into mass produc-
tion, while individual ideas undergo ideological scrutiny to fit the
demands of the market, where predictability and repetition are the
key to commercial success.
Now too large, too populated, and too culturally diverse, the
United States returned to earlier interests in social control, sought
to promote political harmony, and pushed for economic expansion,
which – besides real or imagined dangers from abroad – turned into
the major concerns of the twentieth century. Culture became the
field of operation, and mass communication provided the means of
adaptation and incorporation. One is reminded here of Gramsci’s
writings about the cultural sphere during the 1920s, which coin-
cide with European debates about realism and modernism and
suggest that culture is the result of a complex process of elabora-
tion, which includes the potential role of elites in the manipulation
of popular consciousness to reach consensus through media, educa-
tion, or culture in general. Mass communication practices – with
their technical facility to overcome geographical distances and their

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