The elusive mass media

Abstract

Our lives are awash in media, but we are seldom aware of the role these media play because they are such a part of day-to-day expe? rience. Indeed, any effort to try to analyze media effects independ? ently of the life world in which the media operate is doomed to failure, or at best, trivial findings. The major electronic media are but the latest in the human legacy and involvement with all kinds of media. Thus, while the electronic media, e.g., TV, are certainly dif? ferent from other information media such as newspapers, as well as other experiential and environmental media like architecture, there remain some conceptual similarities. An important reflective turn toward culture and image industries has been going on for some time throughout Europe, although the focus has been at times distinguished by national boundaries. This work by Franco Ferrarotti, an Italian scholar of culture, is quite different from those of some other national traditions. While British scholars have opted for a "cultural analysis" perspective of mass communication, preferring to find class-based biases in the produc? tion and transmission of images to support class distinctions, the French have opted for the literary analyses associated with semio? tics and deconstruction to expose the underlying signs of repression, oppression, domination, and more generically, the inevitability of choices being made in the social construction of order, communica? tion patterns and logics, and of course, the question of meaning. Franco Ferrarotti's approach differs from those of the English and French because he examines the historical foundation of the media traditions which today surround us; equally refreshing is his serious confrontation with the works of Innis, McLuhan, and by implica? tion, perspectives and works, including studies by Altheide, Snow, and Meyrowitz, that have been informed by that tradition, but which have offered a decidedly different cultural twist. Taking the impact of the mass media seriously, Ferrarotti locates the criteria of significance in everyday interaction, including how we speak, listen, perceive and intend. Technology is not simply the broadcasting of images; the nature of imagery has been changed so that the spatial-temporal logic which