Page 69 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

loss of diversity, which applies to the form and content of mass
communication and diminishes a native imagination that sustains
cultural heterogeneity.
The issue, then, is not so much the undisputed presence of
Western media in dependent or developing nations, but their pen-
etration of the respective cultural scenes and their impact on the
creation of reality that will shape the lived experience of people,
provide new meanings, and replace resistance with complacency, if
not acceptance of the status quo. For these efforts, the media also
demand larger economic, technical, and social resources than tradi-
tional cultural institutions ever did, to employ the instruments of
mass communication effectively in the process of incorporation.
In the larger context of cultural imperialism and the charge of
its undesirable effects on dependent societies, mass communication
has become a politicized concept.This shift constitutes a significant
change from social scientific approaches to mass communication in
proceedings of cultural colonization or domination, when address-
ing a politically charged subject from a clearly political perspective
becomes unavoidable. Herbert Schiller does so – in the American
context – with considerable success. He stimulated discussion of US
intervention in the cultural milieu of developing countries during
the late 1960s, in particular, and challenged foreign policy goals
regarding the deployment of mass communication. His work,
although economically determined, places mass communication at
the center of concrete political and economic activities and invites
a Marxist critique of mass communication, not unlike the work of
Dallas Smythe. Together, their efforts focus on the society of the
spectacle, to use Guy Debord’s phrase, to reveal the commodified
process of mass communication in the service of capitalist interests.
In a global context, mass communication contributes to the reign
of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called “empire,” or
an idea of control over social life and human nature, in general,
without spatial or temporal boundaries.
The success of this new form of sovereignty depends to a large
degree on the deployment of mass communication in the interest
of transforming older and more rigidly defined forms of power into
an informational economy with fluid boundaries of domination.
The notions of empire and mass communication, historically con-

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