CHAPTER 18
Origins of the Mass Communication Idea
Concept Coined: First appeared in the 1920s or 1930s.
Initial Application: Applied to new public communication possibilities from the mass press, radio, and film.
Increased Reach: These media expanded the potential audience beyond the literate minority, reaching large populations of nation states more or less simultaneously with standardized content.
New Popular Culture: Gave rise to a new variant of 'popular culture' often embedded with political and social ideologies.
Context of Development:
Rapid change in newly industrialized and centralized nation states.
Growth and concentration of population in large cities.
Mechanization and bureaucratization of life.
Imperialist expansion by great powers.
Profound political change, social movements, unrest, and catastrophic warfare.
Early Meaning of 'Mass Communication':
Derived from the notion of people as a 'mass'—perceived as large, anonymous, ignorant, unstable, irrational, and vulnerable to persuasion, thus in need of control.
Mass media provided the means for guidance by superior classes and leaders.
Formal Definition (Emergence of 'Communication Science' and 'Media Studies'):
Centralized Production: Content by a few large channels with a center–peripheral, hierarchical, and one-directional dissemination network.
Organization Logic: Operated according to market logic or as a state-run public communication institution.
Message Content: Standardized forms open to all, subject to normative and political supervision or control.
Mass Public: Many dispersed, anonymous, and disconnected individuals.
Attributed Power: Great power to persuade and inform, arising from source prestige/popularity, monopolistic channel control, near-instantaneous reception, practitioner skill, and high impact/appeal of means.
The End of Mass Communication?
Resilience of the Idea: The mass communication idea has been compelling and resilient despite changing conditions and disputed assumptions, influencing popular and expert ideas and shaping media research.
Fruitful Disputation: Comprehensive dispute and disproof of the mass communication hypothesis led to a firmer understanding of key principles underlying mediated communication.
Fundamental Insights (still relevant today):
Interpersonal Communication: Often a more compelling or competing source of influence, especially as it converges with mass communication in online, social, and mobile media contexts.
Media Production: Follows an industrial logic (structured, routinized) but also operates under a 'postindustrial' logic (consumer as producer, transformation of formats/genres/texts).
Media Content: Typically has multiple (or no identifiable) purposes and no fixed meaning for receivers, thus largely without predictable effects.
Audience Concept: The idea of isolated individuals in media 'bubbles' or an amorphous 'mass' is largely an illusion.
Conditions of Effect: Depend on structural, social, and individual contexts, media properties, technological affordances, and variable reception features, rather than just transmission.
Continuing Relevance: Predictable effects still occur in some circumstances (e.g., agenda-setting, news learning, opinion formation in crises/heightened emotion). The theory remains relevant for advertisers and propagandists, and much critical theory still depends on the mass communication thesis.
Coexistence of Communication Forms: 'Mass' media and 'mass' communication coexist, interact, and complement (inter-)personal communication and mass self-communication in today's digital environment.
Older mass media have developed consultation/conversational possibilities.
Newer online media are used for 'narrowcasting' and 'broadcasting'.
Convergence: These processes are part of the larger digitalization-driven convergence.
Decline and Transformation: Traditional mass media are in decline relative to new intermediaries (Internet platform companies) but are also transforming, adapting, and expanding.
The Evolution of Mass Communication
Shift, Not End: Reflects a significant and ongoing shift in how public communication purposes are achieved.
From Industrial to Differentiated Vision:
Old Vision: Reaching an entire national public with a restricted range of content; direct, rapid, cost-effective transmission.
New Version: More personal and private, more targeted and interactive, more diffuse, and potentially more powerful.
Goal of Public Communication: Still to know and shape the mediated experience of a target population, but not through monopoly imposition of ideas.
Now, it involves providing a highly differentiated range of content targeted towards innumerable subgroups, accounting for receiver interests, tastes, and circumstances.
Purposes are more varied and opaque.
Held together by voluntary engagement in mediated experience, with contributions from mass self-communication and sharing personal data.
Reinforcing Demand: Personal networks now positively reinforce demand and consumption.
Functionality: Evolution driven by high functionality for key societal forces and connection with human aspirations, benefiting advertisers, global media firms, financial systems, governments, and states.
Consistency: Emerging mass communication aligns with trends towards convergence, globalization, and mediatization.
New Dynamics (from New Media):
Open Access/Connectivity: New media offer potential for open access, allowing many new voices (individuals, movements, groups) to communicate in and to the public.
Human Urge to Share: Stemming from the innate desire to combine, share, cooperate, and embody experiences in rituals/narratives, contributing to shared public culture (e.g., success of social media, reality TV, media events).
'Publicness': All this sharing and new forms of 'publicness' are now part of what mass communication means.
New Media and Mass Communication Theory
Non-Deterministic Role: No evidence supports a deterministic role for new technologies in social, economic, or political processes.
Hybrid Media System: The emerging system has its own logic with points of contrast to earlier media constellations:
Multi-directional, not one-directional.
Encourages/requires response.
No scheduled 'audience', thus no mass public.
Highly diverse in form and content; multimedial and multimodal.
No clear line between private and public.
Allows access to all and seems to evade state policy/control (except in less-than-democratic countries).
Offers no coherent model of public communication, only possibilities within an untransparent system of corporate governance.
Impact on Mass Communication Theory (undermine and reinforce):
Reduced Communicator Power: Inability to reach large, captive audiences and ready availability of alternative sources reduce persuasion/information power.
Individual Freedom: Individuals are no longer restricted by social group or physical availability of few media channels; they can join new groups/communities across space.
No Unitary Message System: No routine exposure to a single message system leading to stereotypes or consensual values.
Active Participation: Individuals can 'answer back' to authority, remove themselves from contact, and actively participate in information/opinion exchanges on social/political issues.
Research Areas: These propositions form the basis for extensive research in 'Internet research', requiring a balance between:
Hopeful accounts (e.g., smartphones in refugee experiences, addressing digital divides).
Critical work (e.g., biases of algorithms, AI systems).
Concerns with New Media Environment:
Lack of Regulation/Self-Regulation: Leads to fears about risks and exploitation for vulnerable groups.
Individuating Nature: Despite connectivity, the Internet often seems more individuating than participative, creating 'tiny villages' governed by commercial corporate entities.
Trust and Reliability: Persistent problems exist in a more open, individualized, and globalized media culture.
Surveillance Power: Greatly extends central state/agency powers with little redress, as 'labor' of surveillance is often done by users themselves (benefiting corporations).
Digital Dependency/Exclusion: Increasing dependence on online communication means new forms of social exclusion for those lacking access or skills.
Vulnerability to Manipulation: Conformity makes individuals vulnerable to unwanted persuasion/manipulation by micro social movements and politicians.
Awareness Raising: Simultaneously, these phenomena enable awareness of critical social issues (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #ClimateStrike).
Optimistic vs. Pessimistic Views: Similar to past mass communication, no clear general balance for benefits or harms can be struck; simplified beliefs and speculation are insufficient for analysis.
Media and Mass Communication Theory: A Grand Narrative?
Concept: A 'grand narrative' (Lyotard) offers a meta-narrative connecting diverse ideas, approaches, and disciplinary legacies within media and mass communication theory amidst social and technological changes.
Explains the role of media and mass communication in society.
Legitimizes the work of scholars across backgrounds.
Concerns: Questions about fragmenting fields, professionalization, and privileging WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) perspectives are acknowledged.
Pattern of Connections: A pattern exists across literature, especially with hybrid, complex, and networked developments in technologies, industries, production, and audience behaviors.
Converging Industries: Media industries stretch operations across multiple channels and platforms.
Remixed Content: Mass-mediated messages are remixed with various formats and genre conventions, involving 'transmedia work' by both conglomerates and individuals.
Fluid Audiences: Audiences congregate and dissipate instantly, engaging in both consumption and production.
Underlying Transformations: Vast social, economic, and political transformations are amplified by new technologies, inspiring a 'materialist turn' in research.
Shift from Stable to Fluid Structures: The meta-narrative since the last edition embodies a big shift:
Formerly stable production: Newsrooms, film/TV studios, large firms.
Formerly stable content: Consensual, ritualized, formulaic industry formats/genres.
Formerly stable audiences: Massively aggregated and programmed around schedules/events.
Increasingly Fluid/'Liquid' Structures (elements change faster than new structures sediment):
Industry: Multi-platform and multi-channel structures with production increasingly organized through 'atypical' working arrangements (outsourced, freelanced).
Content: Rapid development of multimedia, crossmedia, and transmedia storytelling forms.
Audiences: Concurrent media exposure, co-creation, and ensemblematic media use as standard types of 'audiencing'.
Hybrid Environment: Mass communication, interpersonal communication, and mass self-communication converge in a hybrid media environment, necessitating equally hybrid scholarship.
Need for Grand Narrative: This complexity suggests the need to consider theories and traditions in conjunction within a grand narrative to tackle the complexities of the media environment.
Media Influence/Effects: Sophisticated theoretical frameworks (e.g., deep mediatization, communicative figurations, reciprocal media effects models) are emerging to address this seemingly difficult area.
Emerging Consensus: Need for cross-disciplinary theorizing, mixed-methods designs, and approaches that combine/remix scholarship strands.
Integrative research crossing communication subdisciplines is sorely needed.