Week6: birth of mass media...
Being born in an age where mass communication is already a crucial part of social life, I cannot really imagine what astonishing experiences the early scholars of media in the 1930-40s went through. Rapid urbanization and worldwide industrialization brought forth rapid changes in social structure, and the communication system with it. Technology brought about new media forms such as the radio, which "reaches a larger population of people at greater distances than the other mediums, and it reaches them both instantaneously and cheaply" (Cantril & Allport, p.111). State and commercial interests at that time has observed the stunning success of Nazi propaganda, and was exploring efficient ways to transform the groups of people into a mass consumer market through media communication. The emergence of this notion of mass media is directly linked to what Habermas calls "refeudalization of the public sphere". Being bound together as a large mass with little cohesion and mixed up private interests, the bourgeois public sphere of public focused individuals was dissolved.
Though different in their research methods and normative directions, the (still) dominant paradigm of 'administrative approach' set by Lazarsfeld and the critical approach share some of the same views: Mass media functions to maintain the social status quo, standarize and stereotype people. Critical reflexivity as advocated by Frankfurt school or the trust on the partly autonomous receiving capabilities of the audience advocated by the dominat paradigm both are solutions to the same set of problems. The difference of the two approaches was in assessing how dominant such effects were on the individual and the society, not the basic role mass media plays in the social system. And with media technologies ever improving and global media conglomerates gaining more and more ground, it is even more so today.
Then, what does mass media do to the interacting model of community, communication and democracy? Is mass media a dysfunctional foe to be fought against, if we want to recover the great community? Surely mass media tends to get commercial, standarizing in its nature. After all, it carries the same message to a lot of people at the same time, and to do so requires efforts which involve some forms of commercial interests. In this process, some information and messages get salient, whereas others are outshadowed or even actively undermined. But I don't think such unbalanced and one-way flow communication patterns are something awfully new, not then and not even now. the important thing is whether the monopoly of a particular mass media channel can be broken and alternative messages circulated. Sometimes those alternatives utilize existing mass media, or even constitute a mass medium of its own. It may sound paradoxical, but the soultion to the social dysfunctions of mass media is even more mass media. With a broader range of diverse alternative views, that are more relevant to the various lifeworlds of the individuals.
Though different in their research methods and normative directions, the (still) dominant paradigm of 'administrative approach' set by Lazarsfeld and the critical approach share some of the same views: Mass media functions to maintain the social status quo, standarize and stereotype people. Critical reflexivity as advocated by Frankfurt school or the trust on the partly autonomous receiving capabilities of the audience advocated by the dominat paradigm both are solutions to the same set of problems. The difference of the two approaches was in assessing how dominant such effects were on the individual and the society, not the basic role mass media plays in the social system. And with media technologies ever improving and global media conglomerates gaining more and more ground, it is even more so today.
Then, what does mass media do to the interacting model of community, communication and democracy? Is mass media a dysfunctional foe to be fought against, if we want to recover the great community? Surely mass media tends to get commercial, standarizing in its nature. After all, it carries the same message to a lot of people at the same time, and to do so requires efforts which involve some forms of commercial interests. In this process, some information and messages get salient, whereas others are outshadowed or even actively undermined. But I don't think such unbalanced and one-way flow communication patterns are something awfully new, not then and not even now. the important thing is whether the monopoly of a particular mass media channel can be broken and alternative messages circulated. Sometimes those alternatives utilize existing mass media, or even constitute a mass medium of its own. It may sound paradoxical, but the soultion to the social dysfunctions of mass media is even more mass media. With a broader range of diverse alternative views, that are more relevant to the various lifeworlds of the individuals.
posted by KimNakho at
7:01 PM
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