Page 68 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

consequences of depending on Western capitalism as the road to
salvation.
Slovenia is a case in point. Slovene liberalism as a form of nation-
alism flourished with the aid of mass communication that was
culture-specific without being ethnocentric, and with extensive
access to foreign media fare, before Western capital acquired media
properties, including television stations. The latter now promote
mostly American programming at the expense of exploring the
potential contributions of a native culture – currently under siege,
but maturing and changing in this struggle to assert its own iden-
tity and authenticity. At the same time, cultural consumption is not
restricted to leisure time. It has become a constant exercise within
a social environment that contains a range of cultural stimuli, from
the influx of foreign languages – especially English – in public and
private discourse, to advertising billboards for imported products, or
from exotic consumer goods to Yugo rock.
A living culture is a state of permanent revolution, which reaches
for the power of mass communication to sustain its move into a
different future and on its own terms, while the notion of imperi-
alism implies a rupture and intrusion for the purpose of redirecting
these revolutionary impulses of culture to serve some ulterior goal
that is, more often than not, in conflict with the intentions of the
host culture.
In the meantime, the quaint images of a small world, if one thinks
of McLuhan’s global village, or of the persuasive power of a fourth
estate, if one considers earlier conceptions of journalism, have
reappeared in the guise of a global market and the narratives of
worldwide advertising. Indeed, they are the expressions of a new
authenticity, if one wants to believe with Thomas Aquinas that truth
is the expression of reality.
Mass communication remains a central process for the function-
ing of cultural imperialism, cultural leveling (at home and abroad),
and, in a more general way, of the transformation of culture at a
particular historical moment. As a process of representing culture –
under economic or political conditions of domination or depen-
dency – mass communication confronts and challenges the cultural
resources of a people with the aid of a highly centralized media
system that extends the homogenization of culture. The result is a

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