Page 82 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

as a socially and politically responsive approach to an emancipatory
social strategy involving communication and media.The second task
addresses a systematic, historically grounded, and politically informed
examination of the nature of contemporary social communication.
But most significantly, perhaps, both tasks require active participa-
tion and suggest social and political commitment to a concrete
involvement in emancipatory causes that lead to transformations in
communication and media with the disclosure of contemporary
practices, discourses, and representations of culture.
When postmodernism arrived in the United States amidst an
ongoing critique of mass communication research, and culture in
general, it was met with ambivalence or suspicion, although its
arguments helped deconstruct the received notion of mass
communication.
Paradigm shifts in the context of academic work are the result of
complex social, political, and cultural developments that enable ideas
to rise and take hold of the imagination of individuals in their own
struggle against a dominant professional ideology. The decentering
of mass communication research occurred under such circumstances
– aided by the influence of modernist and postmodernist European
ideas related to notions of culture, ideology, and power and the
increasing relevance of language (and the production of meaning)
in the study of social formations – in addition to a rapidly shifting
terrain of communication studies away from narrow conceptualiza-
tions of media and towards the inclusive category of culture.
The resulting practice of theory and research reflects the work-
ings of a critical consciousness on issues related to the privileged
and authoritative knowledge of mass communication research and
contributes to a blending of the humanities and social sciences as a
major intellectual project of recent years. Contemporary writings
about communication and culture explore these extensions and offer
evidence of mass communication research as a blurred genre among
signs of a more radical break with tradition.
Decentering mass communication research, however, has not
resulted in terminating universal or general claims to authoritative
knowledge of communication and media. It is equally clear that
mass communication research has been challenged by intellectually
and ideologically formidable alternatives, and that the process of

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