Page 71 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

X

In fact, mass communication in its practical or concrete form has
been accompanied by theoretical observations in the larger context
of theories of society, especially when media join other institutions,
such as those of religion or education, as crucial elements of an
intellectual superstructure of society. Thus, theories of mass com-
munication emerged from the discourse of American social sciences
during the 1940s, although their beginnings are in the 1920s with
the impact of Pragmatism on social thought – and even earlier in
Europe, and Germany in particular.
The early writings of German political economists (during the
latter part of the nineteenth century) contributed a strong economic
bias to considerations of mass communication in the context of
traditional ties between politics and business; they focused attention
on the real and potential conflict between two major functions of
mass communication: public service and private enterprise. But while
the German perspective on mass communication emphasized a
leader–masses dichotomy in representations of social, political, or
cultural developments, an emerging American view revealed a ten-
dency to consider mass communication as a process of representing
competing ideas in a classless society; here ideas are available from
many sources and offered to the public in a spirit of equality of
worth or importance.
This notion resides in Pragmatism, an American philosophy of
gradual change, adjustment, and continuity, which celebrates the
ideas of community and communication as central to making
democracy a workable condition of human existence. It developed
at a time when industrialization was sweeping through society and
the spirit of evolutionary change was being pushed aside by a
revolutionary burst of technological advance that included a new
working definition of communication, open to the imagination of
private enterprise and safeguarded by constitutional guarantees.
Indeed, Pragmatism recognizes the centrality of communication
to a social-philosophical explanation of American society. The sig-
nificance of the telegraph, railroads, highways, and rivers as means
of transportation, and the spread of schools, libraries, and newspapers
as institutional sources of knowledge and experience provided

59