Page 75 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

warning “speed kills” has larger implications for the continuing
automation of mass communication and its impact on a new vision
of a democratic society, when reasonable demands on time for
thoughtful deliberation will characterize the ways of political
communication.
Beyond these issues, however, remain unanswered questions about
the effects of mass communication, which would not only occupy
social scientific inquiries into relations between the media and
society for most of the twentieth century, but stimulate a cultural
critique of traditional perspectives on mass communication.

XI

The public uses of mass communication technologies, however, has
not only confirmed the social and political realities of economic
progress, but reinforced attempts to promote the role of mass com-
munication in the conceptualization of democracy. Indeed, the task
of combining notions of democracy and communication fell to the
social sciences. Social theory, at the time, realizing the tension
between reality and possibility – necessary, as Immanuel Kant sug-
gests, for human understanding – transcended the actual world and
engaged the imagination. The latter produced insights about com-
munication and a democratic life that dwelt in the realm of pas-
toral visions of community or in a realization that living with
democratic communication as an ideal would remain an eternal
challenge. In either case, wanting to live in an ideal world, accord-
ing to Goethe, always requires treating the impossible as if it were
possible.
These developments of mass communication were accompanied
by social scientific mass communication research for most of the
twentieth century, beginning with earlier sociological observations
and ending with a full-fledged academic field of study.The promi-
nence of mass communication studies emanated from the signifi-
cance of the effect; it is a preoccupation of the reigning institutions
with considerable investments in the practices of advertising, public
relations, or journalism. The credibility of these efforts rests on the
work of the social sciences, whose analysis of mass communication

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