Page 67 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

openness, they require cultural interaction for enhancing the idea of
progress or modernization.
Differently expressed, the territorial struggles of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries with their military occupation – or
the revolutionary movements in more recent years that conquered
radio or television stations long before suppressing any physical resis-
tance – have been replaced successfully by an infiltration of cultural
goods, whose effectiveness leads to a homogenization (or Western-
ization) of cultures – more recently like those in eastern Europe.
The Cold War victory, in other words, was won by cultural means
rather than military options; or, as Thomas Pynchon describes it in
Gravity’s Rainbow, modern wars are always waged between media,
communication technologies, and data streams. This new course of
aggression and domination features the arena of mass communica-
tion as the ideological battleground in the fight for the hearts and
minds of people. It is a struggle for consensus with the means of
mass persuasion, including the attraction of cultural goods, such as
music, films, or literature.
In fact, cultural imperialism in its more abstract form refers to
the rise of capitalism, the development of markets, and the process
of modernity, when strong historical forces – as nations – insist on
defining progress and on promoting their credibility domestically as
well as abroad. It also reflects the move from an industrial stage of
economic development to an information (and service) stage with
a central role for the means of mass communication in the domain
of production, where industrial growth and expansion shift to the
spread of information and knowledge as forms of control. In other
words, cultural imperialism does not act only in pursuit of intended
goals, as is often claimed, but is a more general consequence of
expansion and a byproduct of a specific economic order, like a
free-market system, that becomes a tool of domination.
For instance, under these circumstances, most east European soci-
eties, which had been invited to join a free-market economy after
the fall of the Berlin Wall and throughout the 1990s, were quickly
inundated with the cultural goods of their Western neighbors.They
also copied Western lifestyles, with the help of Western media, and
celebrated consumerism as a liberation movement with the aid of
advertising and Western merchandize – before they realized the

55