Page 79 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

raised questions about the relevance of inquiries whose exclusion-
ary nature provoked the possibility of new paradigms and encour-
aged critical voices from within the field. Thus, as the result of a
theoretical position that produces knowledge by accretion, relies on
verification of a priori hypotheses, and seeks a generalizability of its
findings, mass communication research joined the ranks of a social
science tradition whose bas ic belief structure has come in for close
scrutiny and outright critique by a growing number of alternative
perspectives. After all, social scientific constructs, and the idea of
mass communication specifically, are still cultural inventions and,
therefore, subject to revision and change.
The social and political conditions of communication in the
world – beyond the parochialism of US mass communication
research – have produced a creative and potentially useful atmos-
phere of critical introspection, encouraged by emancipatory move-
ments and supported by historically conscious reconsiderations of
knowledge about communication. As a discursive shift produces a
new understanding of communication, it reveals alternative per-
spectives by introducing a number of useful options to rethink the
notion of communication as information.Thus, it is no accident that
during the latter part of the 1980s, in particular, refocusing on the
“critical” in communication became widespread, while mass com-
munication as a field of study looked for new ways of understand-
ing its own history and meeting the challenges to its traditional
paradigm.
In addition, accessibility to the more recent cultural discourse in
Europe – including a sustained critique of capitalism – also intro-
duced alternative ways of thinking about communication. These
new perspectives were particularly effective, because they addressed
directly the traditional concerns of mass communication research
related to the role and function of media in society, while their
theoretical possibilities contained the potential for a major paradigm
shift.
For instance, the previous notion of information society under-
went an ideological critique when communication was reintroduced
as a viable, if complex, concept of human practice. In fact, the idea
of communication related again to human agency and the emanci-
patory struggle of the individual, and political considerations of

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