Page 81 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

the domain of values, that the relationship of meaning and language
to culture is central to constituting reality, that the interpretive
nature of culture and communication precludes a fixed or final
truth, that the relations between representation and reality are politi-
cal, that thought is mediated by historically grounded power rela-
tions, and that privilege and oppression in society are reproduced,
although perhaps unwittingly, by traditional research practices.
Coming up against an alternative critical discourse – produced
by a convergence of writings identified with the critical theory of
Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich
Fromm, the later work of Jürgen Habermas, the contributions to
cultural studies of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and specific
references to the works of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and
Michel Foucault, in particular – mass communication research faces
a formidable challenge to its traditional position. Because together
these writings produce a new and different type of knowledge, one
that focuses on notions of culture, empowers the individual, and
addresses the consequences of an industrialization of the mind to
expose relations of power in the process of communication and
provide a forceful critique of cultural practices.
Critical communication studies reproduces such theoretical con-
siderations and constructs research agendas that reflect the need for
alternative readings of communication and media. Thus, a Marxian
tradition open to the critical currents of postmodern social theo-
ries promises a postmodernized practice which extends the critique
of culture and communication beyond deconstructing the dominant
discourse of mass communication research. Its responsibility in the
context of a shifting discourse of communication and media studies
is twofold: to identify contradictions and negations located in the
objective narratives of empirical mass communication research,
while exposing its ideological nature, and to connect theoretical
considerations of communication and the media with the specifics
of everyday experiences.
The first task involves the review and analysis of the decontex-
tualized construction of mass communication as a social process and
the adoption of its definitions across social and political formations.
Such a review reveals the discursive practices of mass communica-
tion research over a considerable period and suggests its limitations

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