Page 89 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

communication, as John Dewey describes it in The Public and its
Problems.
But the time had passed and the proximity between community
and communication vanished, since Gemeinschaft had already turned
to Gesellschaft when society entered the twentieth century. The
world had become too complex for most individuals, as Walter
Lippmann warned in Public Opinion, and he became increasingly
pessimistic about the future of democracy, starting with the incom-
petent individual. Since then, the history of mass communication
has been the history of a deteriorating relationship between ideals
of democracy and understandings of communication.
The enormous technological advances in mass communication
that came with industrial growth – for example the invention of
the telephone, electric light, linotype, phonograph, photography, and
movies, but also the automobile and the airplane – produced para-
doxical results. While this development enhanced and enlarged the
production and dissemination of culture, it eliminated most people
from the process of social communication as it had removed them
earlier from production and transformed them into consumers (also
of mass communication). For example, while the typewriter, the
telephone, or the camera invite participation and allow the unre-
stricted expression of ideas, the industrialization of film, radio, or
television reduced individuals to audiences.
This permanent shift from individuals as producers to consumers
of the societal narrative has never been reversed, regardless of the
late arrival of the computer, whose built-in freedom of choice is
being threatened by government regulation.Thus, the idea of a nur-
turing and protective press, described by Karl Marx, the journalist
– who uses the term Volkspresse – which functions neither as an
authoritative instrument of elitist control, nor as an exclusive pub-
lication for and by a specific class, but as a public sphere that accom-
modates the voice of the people with its own tolerance for dissent,
has never been realized. Neither has Walter Benjamin’s suggestion
that in a truly socialist society every newspaper reader is also a
writer or reporter. Nor the ad-free newspaper (PM) of Ralph Inger-
soll in New York, or the commercial-free television programs in
Europe or the United States.Although these notions remain an ideal
premise for participatory social communication, they remain histor-

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