Page 41 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

30 From medium to meaning

rooted in what is now identified in scholarly circles as “the Frankfurt
16
School,” focused on the role of media in the development of what came
to be called “mass society.” Behind this notion was the influential idea in
social theory that the evolution to modernity in the industrialized West
needed to be seen against the backdrop of an ideal (and idealized) social
life that preceded it. This was most influentially put by Ferdinand Tönnies
in his classic work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. 17 Tönnies contended
that pre-industrial society was defined by a set of social relations closely
connected to place, family, and worldview. With the increasing rationaliza-
tion of society under industrialization came social dislocations that
undermined this original, ideal, situation.
Mass-society theory held that among these dislocations was the concen-
tration of populations organized around the manufacturing centers of the
Industrial Revolution. This led to migrations of labor from the farm and
village to the cities, and even to cities abroad. The new population
centers – the industrial cities – were places which lacked the kind of social
connectedness and sense of location that are important to human social
consciousness and social stability. Thus a “mass society” replaced the
numerous settled societies from which this labor force had come. In such a
mass society, factors of difference such as language, culture, religion, etc.,
that had traditionally provided the foundations of identity and worldview
for individuals would become less and less effective. This is where mass
media were thought to come in, replacing those lost ties with new ones
that would link individuals to their new location. Mass-society theory in
fact feared the consequences of this situation, supposing that the media
were at the same time incapable of authentically carrying out such func-
tions and potentially involved in ideological domination of various kinds
as a result. 18
The second scholarly direction taken in the mid-twentieth century also
focused on the media themselves, but proposed to study their assumed
“effects” in a more individual and psychological sense. This developed into
what is now called the “dominant paradigm” in American media research.
The idea was that the various media were to be best understood and
studied in terms of their intended consequences on readers, viewers, and
audiences. A newspaper was intended to inform, for example, so research
and scholarship needed to undertake the task of seeing whether it was
successful in doing so. Unintended and negative consequences of media
exposure were also studied. The most prominent example of this was the
extensive research project that, over a number of decades, focused on the
question of the effects of media violence on viewers, particularly on
younger viewers. 19
Other topics have also been addressed by the “effects” tradition,
including individual psychological effects, 20 political and civic engage-
ment, 21 adolescent socialization, 22 and ethnic and gender roles and