The mass media and society

5.3 The mass media and society

The major questions posed by media and cultural studies are the new and different ways of looking at life. All developments in the media destabilise the existing beliefs about the ability and the right of ordinary people to acquire knowledge beyond their own experience, and raise questions about the perspective from which public knowledge is manufactured. Communica- tion, in the generally humanising sense, is the production, perception and grasp of messages bearing man’s notion of his philosophy (defined in terms of what exists), his politics (expressed as what is important) and his morality (defined as what is right).

For a long time the messages and images that composed the matrix of popular culture were produced within the small unit of the tribe, village or family. As people became aware of the exterior influences beyond their own family, tribe or village, social interaction became primarily aural, and

Mass media theory

increasingly took on a regional point of view rather than a purely localised one. It was the Industrial Revolution that gradually replaced the age-old process of filtering down and person-to-person transmission of information with a system of mass production, bringing an almost simultaneous introduction of information, ideas, images and products at all levels of society. The changes in the early part of the nineteenth century as a result of the transformation of Europe from an agrarian into an urban society gave rise to the concerns about the concomitant changes in the minds and the hearts of the people. Ferdinand Tonnies, writing in 1887, developed the theory of the contrast between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft. He describes all that that was intimate, private, exclusive, the living together in understanding; as Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, he signified as public life. Gemeinschaft is with one’s family; one lives in it from birth to death, and is bound to it. He observed that one goes into Gesellschaft as one goes into a strange country. Tonnies introduces his proposal on the

difference between city and countryside thus 2 : There exists a Gemeinschaft of language, of folk ways of mores and

beliefs, but by way of contrast Gesellschaft exists in the realm of business, travel and science. Gemeinschaft is old; Gesellschaft is new as

a name as well as an occurrence. He points out that Gemeinschaft extols and gives all praise to rural life 2 :

The people living in Gemeinschaft are stronger and therefore more alive. It is the lasting and genuine form of living together and this is in contrast to Gesellschaft. Accordingly Gemeinschaft should be under- stood as a living organism; Gesellschaft as a mechanical aggregate or artefact.

This view of modern urban society was the basis of the fear that society was disintegrating as the individual was becoming an atomised, dehumanised figure, who was seemingly easily manipulated and controlled by political movements and individuals. The concept of mass society arose at this time, and was associated with the growth of the mass media.

During the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century, newspapers had become major vehicles of mass opinion and influence. During this period the conditions for a radical, reforming newspaper industry had largely disappeared. Mass production and the centralisation of capital investment needed for the establishing of the complex technology of newspaper production had centred ownership of the major newspapers within the hands of a small group of press barons.

Managing in the Media

This led to the central concern about the mass media; that is, the questioning of the position from which the influence propagated by the mass media is generated. In the early part of the nineteenth century the anxiety was that the press was in the hands of radical revolutionaries who had to be restrained by legal persecution. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the concern was that the ownership of newspapers was in the hands of a limited number of people who would have the power to use the newspapers to their own ends. With the advent of film, later wireless, and finally television, the debate about the ownership, influence and system used in the mass media became the main discussion points surrounding mass society and cultural studies.

During the First World War, propaganda was used in a concentrated way for the first time and, at the conclusion of hostilities, it was commonly believed that it had had a profound effect on the outcome of the War. There was little doubt that the mass media were an extremely strong influence on the attitudes and behaviour of mass society in the 1920s. In the USA and Germany, research studies were established in attempts to understand how it worked. The introduction of mass media research accompanied the growth of the wider study of social science, with its concentration on the implications of mass society and popular culture. Throughout the nineteenth century political power had been shifting from the upper to the middle and lower classes, thus bringing about in this century what Gustav Le Bon has

called the ‘era of crowds’. He states 3 : Today it is the traditions which used to obtain in politics and the

individual rulers which do not count, while on the contrary the voice of the masses has become preponderant.

The Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft theory of Tonnies, coupled with the work of Emile Durkheim, led to the view that the social nature of human beings was focused with an equally developed theory of their psychological nature. Briefly, human conduct was thought to be largely a product of a genetic endowment; that is, the causes of behaviour were sought within a biological structure. This developed into the early twentieth century model of the social organisation of industrial capitalist societies, which characterised them as made up of a vast workforce of atomised, isolated individuals, without traditional bonds of location or kinship, who were alienated from their labour by its repetitive, unskilled tendencies and their subjugation to the vagaries of the wage relationship and the fluctuation of the market. It was felt that such individuals were entirely at the mercy of totalitarian ideologies and propaganda and, secondly, of the mass media, comprising in this period

Mass media theory

the emergent radio and cinema. This line of thought was to have important implications for the early interpretation of the mass media.