Page 74 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

recent wave of new technologies – from cable television to the
internet – repeats the promise of accessibility and participation in
the democratic process. These waves have consistently translated
mass communication performance into speed, beginning in the
nineteenth century; it was a time when the French poet Alphonse
de Lamartine could exclaim, with reference to the speed of news-
paper circulation, that “the book arrives too late.” A century later,
newspapers were outdistanced by the immediacy of broadcast
media, which, in turn yielded to the velocity of computers. Roll
film capitulated to digital processes, which rush words and images
– made for instant gratification and quick disposal – across the
screen and around the globe.
Speed also informs contemporary social and political practices. It
is a cultural characteristic whose consequences became most notice-
able during the twentieth century with the rapid development of
information technologies. Baudrillard once observed that the
United States represents the triumph of effect over cause and of
instantaneity over time as depth. The result is a lack of contempla-
tion amidst growing opportunities for exploitation and control.
Thus, when McLuhan proposes that, with an increasing speed of
communication, politics tends to abandon notions of representation
or delegation in favor of an immediate involvement of the entire
community, he disregards political (or government) intent. For
instance, media coverage of war against Iraq demonstrates how the
speed of communication aids politics (and the media) in control-
ling levels of public involvement through propaganda efforts with a
predictable ideological slant.
In fact, the principle of instantaneousness dictates the production
of information and entertainment and shapes a postmodern under-
standing of mass communication, in which moment connects to
moment without a sense of past or future. Speed replaces reflection,
as effect supersedes content and content displaces meaning, in the
panopticon of modern media practices. There is no return to con-
templation, reasoned judgment, or to a creative pause in the speed
of mass communication. Instead, flashing realities are produced
without historical consciousness to equip audiences on their travels
through social, cultural, and political spaces, gaining fleeting impres-
sions, which are soon reduced to a blurred memory of society.The

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