Page 76 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

soared to new heights of respectability during the last century.
As real life became indistinguishable from the stream of mass-
communicated messages, scientific expertise was called upon to
identify cause and effect.
This resulted in the production of “mass communication
research,” a marketable institution that accompanies the production
and maintenance of mass communication processes. It appeared
within the discourse of the social sciences with a particular under-
standing of the political and economic importance of social com-
munication, the location of the media in society, and the search for
knowledge about mass communication. Based on work in sociol-
ogy, social psychology, and psychology, in particular – and therefore
associated with a traditional institutional apparatus and its discipli-
nary practices – mass communication research is characterized by a
strong bias towards quantitative methods, which are grounded in the
guiding principles of positivism or post-positivism.
Such guiding principles ultimately confirmed a social scientific
approach that promised detached, value-free, and objective observa-
tions. The result was a search for a scientifically knowable world –
the lived conditions of a media environment – which is the only
world that matters as a legitimate terrain of scientific exploration.
Whether such a reality is perfectly (positivism) or imperfectly (post-
positivism) captured, however – according to the reigning theories
of the past decades – remained part of a struggle, particularly after
the 1970s, over the preservation of a dominant discursive practice,
which defined the reality of media and communication in terms of
invasive technologies and their institutional and collective purposes
(or functions).They typically catered to specific social, political, and
economic interests and provided the context for the rise of mass
communication research as the source of (social) knowledge and
(political) power.
For instance, these interests have been institutionalized by a deci-
sive turn from communication to information which coincided
with the emergence of cybernetics and a scientific or technical
explanation of its significance for society. The notion of an infor-
mation society, in particular, epitomized already existing social
scientific canons of context-free generalization and cause-and-effect
explanation and celebrated the potential of prediction and control.

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