Page 94 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

were quickly swept up in a technological revolution that, during
the early twentieth century, distinguished the United States from
Europe as a place where democratic practice meant access to and
use of the concrete manifestations of progress: automobiles, freeways,
skyscrapers, the suburbs, and electricity for everyone. In addition,
mass-circulation newspapers and picture magazines, Hollywood
movies, and radio transmissions spread familiarity and raised
expectations.
There was knowledge about rather than knowledge of society –
as Robert Park distinguishes the process of knowing the world –
with its own dynamic of defining a nation in terms of cultural and
political homogeneity long before fast-food chains and public per-
sonalities would introduce new forms of authenticity. The latter
emphasized the uniqueness of the shared experience, when com-
munication exhausted itself in the act of consumption. It was a
ready-made culture that embraced ready-made information to serve
mass consumption, not unlike the widespread use of the Sears
Roebuck catalog (or the Bible, for that matter) to spread ready-
made ideologies of material (and spiritual) consumption around
nineteenth-century rural America.
Since then, mass communication has become the expression of
an ideology of commercialism that dominates society and dictates
the rules of communicative encounters within the public sphere.
Participants in the discourse of consumption are the affluent,
economically stronger classes of society. There are no material or
cultural goods designed for the oppressed, who become commu-
nicatively marginalized in their societal role. There is also no com-
munication link – or media effort – to understand their culture and
assist them in overcoming a predicament that has been caused by
society.
In fact, new technologies of mass communication have not
lowered but raised the barriers between classes, with higher costs
and higher intellectual demands.They have also destroyed traditional
rhythms of work and leisure, which include ways of obtaining and
disseminating information that have been replaced by the media. In
the process, civil society is being divided and identified by signifi-
cantly different relations to mass communication.

82