Post-mass culture

Abstract

H 'ave the mass media rendered us more or less .similar over time? The answers to this question betray deep divisions among intellectuals. Some point up the homogenizing influence of the mass media, which are conceived as a cultural furnace into which individual social elements are shoveled to become fused, alloyed. Others argue that by opening up new vistas, by offering new styles and an expanded range of alternatives, the media's multifarious offerings render us increasingly diverse in thought and action. To determine which assessment of the media's influence on contemporary American society is correct, we turn first to the historical circumstances out of which the present situation developed. In the late nineteenth century social scientists noted that as societies modernized and advanced institutionally, the roles individuals played became increasingly specialized and differentiated. They recognized modernization as a centrifugal force that weakened local ties and rendered beliefs and behaviors increasingly dissimilar. Paradoxically, modernization created new centripetal tendencies as well, attended by an expanding web of functional interdependencies that enhanced social solidarity. Modernizing societies remained intact, but for different reasons. Out of this sociological framework came the idea of mass society. While it was most prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, it still enjoys some currency today. The theory of mass society generally holds that modernization produces a mass of people, functionally linked, but socially and emotionally isolated. Lacking the psychic sanctuary and larger sense of purpose that membership in cohesive social groups provides, members of a mass society are susceptible to media persuasion and influence. Highly purposive, the media were presumed to be capable of creating a new, pervasive normative order. Thus by the 1920s, Harold Lasswell could call the mass media and their most manipulative issue, propaganda, the "new hammer and anvil of social solidarity."