The Mass Media and Their Role in Social Life

Abstract

The last several decades of the 20th century have been marked by the significant development of mass communications — the propagation of information (knowledge, spiritual values, moral and legal norms, etc.) by technological media (the press, radio, movies, television) to numerically large and spatially dispersed audiences. Within the life span of a single generation, this process has come, by one means or another, to encompass the entire globe. The technological media for the spread of information have penetrated into places where for centuries the only source of information about the world beyond the confines of the patriarchal community had been the spoken word. This penetration, aided by the spread of literacy, has brought about far-reaching changes in people's consciousness and in their attitudes toward objective facts and toward themselves. These changes have created the preconditions for drawing into political life and struggle masses of new people who had formerly lived in conformity to only the interests of their own economically closed and culturally isolated little worlds. The political and ideological cleavages of today's world have caused these preconditions to bear real fruit.