Week8. Of what is within the mass society...
When we talked about how the concept of the 'mass' has arisen in week 6, it is only natural that we look into how the society that consists of this mass functions. This week's readings deal with how scholars of post WW2 have viewed the mass society, which was not a course which the society was headed any more, but already a status quo. Conformity, consumption and uniformity were the seeming trend of the era, and scholars were looking for ways how to keep a democratic society where the traditional notion of a democratic 'public' has kind of disappeared.
There are more pessimistic views and less pessimistic views, but all they have in common was that the mass media plays a significant role in making such a society possible. Lazarsfeld and Merton argue that the mass media has three main functions, which are status conferral, enforcement of social norms, and narcotizing dysfunction. However, for the mass media to become actually tools of effective propaganda, more conditions such as monopolization, canalization and supplementation have to be met. It is also the viewpoint of Gans, who walks about the suburban life which has its own subdimension of ethnic and class based communities. Looking deep into the lives of the Leavittowners ethnographically, the 'mass' in fact consists of smaller communities that are bound by cultural commonalities. He notes that for the Levittowners the "most enduring - and certainly the most frequent - tie to the national culture is through the mass media"(p190). However the messages are filtered through personal dispositions, thus instead of being dominated they use mass media rather as a escape tool. Is it a narcotyzing dysfunction as termed by Merton & Lazarsfeld? In some parts yes, but in some parts no because political communication does still occur in the community level, which is not dominated by mass media.
As Bell says, the pessimistic theories on mass society has blamed mass communication for carrying out a uniformizing of tastes and cultures on the society as a whole, making critical standards of the educated elite powerless. And they go on romantizing the past, where authentic ('great') communities existed. However he continues to argue that communities still exist even in a mass society. What it implies for us in this even more massed mass society is the question of how such sub dimensions and the bigger dimensions of a society can be connected, constituting a large 'mass'. How to balance between the various layers of social dimensions in our life, to make democratic processes possible in each and all of them. To achieve this, we should not look for a community that consists entirely as a community per se, but the strains of communication between the communities within and the bigger mass society as a whole.
There are more pessimistic views and less pessimistic views, but all they have in common was that the mass media plays a significant role in making such a society possible. Lazarsfeld and Merton argue that the mass media has three main functions, which are status conferral, enforcement of social norms, and narcotizing dysfunction. However, for the mass media to become actually tools of effective propaganda, more conditions such as monopolization, canalization and supplementation have to be met. It is also the viewpoint of Gans, who walks about the suburban life which has its own subdimension of ethnic and class based communities. Looking deep into the lives of the Leavittowners ethnographically, the 'mass' in fact consists of smaller communities that are bound by cultural commonalities. He notes that for the Levittowners the "most enduring - and certainly the most frequent - tie to the national culture is through the mass media"(p190). However the messages are filtered through personal dispositions, thus instead of being dominated they use mass media rather as a escape tool. Is it a narcotyzing dysfunction as termed by Merton & Lazarsfeld? In some parts yes, but in some parts no because political communication does still occur in the community level, which is not dominated by mass media.
As Bell says, the pessimistic theories on mass society has blamed mass communication for carrying out a uniformizing of tastes and cultures on the society as a whole, making critical standards of the educated elite powerless. And they go on romantizing the past, where authentic ('great') communities existed. However he continues to argue that communities still exist even in a mass society. What it implies for us in this even more massed mass society is the question of how such sub dimensions and the bigger dimensions of a society can be connected, constituting a large 'mass'. How to balance between the various layers of social dimensions in our life, to make democratic processes possible in each and all of them. To achieve this, we should not look for a community that consists entirely as a community per se, but the strains of communication between the communities within and the bigger mass society as a whole.
posted by KimNakho at
9:08 PM
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