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Mass Society, Mass Culture, and Mass Communication: the Meaning of Mass1

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Mass Society, Mass Culture, and Mass Communication: the Meaning of Mass1 International Journal of Communication 3 (2009), 998-1024 1932-8036/20090998 Mass Society, Mass Culture, and Mass Communication: The Meaning of Mass1 KURT LANG GLADYS ENGEL LANG University of Washington The concept of mass goes back a long way to characterize a society that consists of people somehow connected by communication while, at the same time, also dispersed in space and essentially detached from one another. Mass has also been a pejorative for critics of modern capitalist society and its culture. In the years after World War II, this latter use of the term became the target of a broadside attack by several highly credentialed scholars, who questioned its value as an analytic tool. This paper, starting with Ferdinand Tönnies, offers a brief overview of both the origins of the concept of mass and its subsequent refinement by French, German, and American sociologists into the mid-1930s. Distinguishing between its ideological connotations and the analytic use of the term helps us to focus on the most general and persistent effects of mass communication: expanding the range of common experience and making people more responsive to distant events. This effect is magnified by the ubiquity of mass media; practically no one, not even those who scorn them, can altogether escape their influence. As a scholarly discipline matures, aficionados begin to review its history less to gain new insights than to retrieve a past in danger of getting lost. So it is that in this paper we focus on the significance and history of “mass” in order to highlight its original meaning. The appellation does indeed go back a long way before its employment not only as a modifier of communication, but also as a means to express one’s 1 An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the annual International Communication Association Conference, May 21-25, 2009. The authors express thanks to Jefferson Pooley of Muhlenberg College for helpful comments on a draft. Kurt Lang: [email protected] Gladys Engel Lang: [email protected] Date submitted: 2009-07-13 Copyright © 2009 (Kurt Lang & Gladys Engel Lang). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org. International Journal of Communication 3 (2009) Mass Society, Mass Culture, and Mass 999 dislike of modern capitalist society and its culture. Yet, while its meaning, to be sure, has always been somewhat problematic, it was only after World War II that the concept became the target of a broadside attack by several highly credentialed scholars, who challenged its appropriateness as a descriptor of modern society, its culture, and its media audiences. These scholars cited certain facts that “mass society theorists” were said to have ignored. Examination of the literature on “mass” suggests that their criticisms had a distinctly ideological component, and that quite different versions of the concept had been painted with the same broad brush and occasional careless readings of text — small wonder that they found inconsistencies and some all-too-obvious exaggerations in the writings of these “mass society theorists.” Rather than present a point-by-point refutation, we first examine the intellectual and political context that fueled their criticisms, and then follow this with a highly condensed overview of both the origins of the concept of “mass” and its refinement from the end of the 19th century to the mid-1930s, at which time the political Left was about to develop its own view of mass, mass society, and mass culture to counter that of conservatives. Our aim is to salvage the sociological meaning of the term “mass” from the surrounding ideological rhetoric with a focus on insights still relevant for today’s study of mass communication. We begin with a quick look back at how “mass communication” came to denote characteristics that today most everyone takes for granted. When people speak of the media, they usually have in mind corporate bodies or government agencies whose access to modern technology enables them to disseminate the same uniform content to a geographically dispersed multitude. At first, this capability was confined to cheap print, and then later expanded to motion-pictures, both of which were still dependent on physical transport. This limitation did not extend to either radio or television, which, given their wide reach, were destined to become the media of mass communication par excellence. But to develop into mass communication, the new technology had to be employed to reach a large audience. As late as the end of the 1920s, Ernest W. Burgess (1886-1966), a University of Chicago sociologist whose interest was mostly in human ecology, could still write about the conquest of space by new forms of transportation and communication, such as the automobile, the motion picture, the airplane, and the radio, without even a single reference to the expansion in the size of audiences and its consequences (1929, p. 1072). Two years later, David O. Woodbury devoted a book (1931) to “communication at a distance,” grouping mass media with personal communication forms, such as letters that rely on carriers, or with those which do not. Distance-communication nowadays would surely include networking via the Internet, which, when compounded and saturated with particular content, can reach the multitudes sought out by propagandists and public relations specialists. Be this as it may, Harold D. Lasswell (1902-1978), in his introduction to a voluminous bibliography on propaganda and promotional activities, noted that “[b]efore cheap printing and general literacy, before moving pictures and radio, the possibilities of applying stimuli simultaneously to masses were extremely restricted” (1935, p. 17). The Internet, though open to many uses, has this potential. The point we want to make is this: It took a while for scholars, concerned as they were with propaganda and its consequences, to embrace the idea that “propaganda regardless of definition, must be regarded as a special form of mass communication,” one with rather invidious connotations (Willey, 1935, p. 195). The generic label offered by Willey, however fitting, proved to be a sleeper, taking more than a decade to come into general use. 1000 Kurt Lang & Gladys Engel Lang International Journal of Communication 3(2009) From a sociological perspective, the most striking feature of modern communication technology is its capacity to expand social relations beyond the clan, the tribe, and the local community. While ancient empires were built on military force and the loyalty of a small number of chieftains to a central authority, the typical social unit today covers far more territory and embraces more people than could once have been thought possible. This expansion is not just a matter of size, but also one of density. Individuals different in background, orientation, and skill, clustered in and around urban centers, have become more interdependent, and also, though only indirectly, more active participants in political life. The centrality of communication in the development of a common identity was, of course, a tenet of the Chicago School, a group whose influence extended beyond the University of Chicago. It drew heavily on the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936), the first to attempt a systematic formulation of what was new and unprecedented about modern society. His classic treatise revolves around two fundamentally different types of relationships — Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. These two types could co-exist in the same society, but the balance between them was changing. As Tönnies described the change, the smaller, more natural community (Gemeinschaft), whose solidarity was based on consanguinity, was giving way to society (Gesellschaft), which exists as “a circle of people who, as a community, live and reside peacefully near one another but are not quintessentially connected but substantially detached and, while on the one hand they remain connected despite their detachment, they remain, on the other, detached despite their connectedness” ([1877] 1922, p. 39).2 In this kind of social unit, each person acts essentially for him or herself, yet remains dependent on others by way of exchange rather than by gift giving. As consanguinity ties weaken, social relations become ever more instrumental, voluntary, and consensual while the unity of the society revolves more and more around common territory, language, or shared history propagated first through print and subsequently through other forms of communication that mediate across great distances. Theodor Geiger (1891-1952), a Danish sociologist who, albeit erroneously, is often classified as a critic of the mass society concept, summed the consequences of technological development even more succinctly and more eloquently: “Today mutual dependence . exists among people, most of them strangers and personally indifferent to one another. What connects them are not the bonds of sympathy but the necessities of life” (1955, p. 79).3 Appeals to sentiments of sympathy to strengthen social solidarity no longer made sense to Geiger. The more pressing need was for people to recognize intellectually their objective interdependence; education had to be directed toward this goal. Restated in cultural and political terms, communication technology has led to a greater involvement of the masses, previously confined to the periphery of society, in the activities and ideas of its central institutions (Shils, [1962] 1975). Or, as Daniel Lerner (1957) put it, media exposure develops a capacity for empathy, without which participation in the thought life of a geographically extended society would be severely limited. 2 Translations are those of the authors unless otherwise indicated. 3 An earlier, much longer version of this article with the same title had actually appeared six years earlier (Geiger, 1949). International Journal of Communication 3 (2009) Mass Society, Mass Culture, and Mass 1001 The new media have also affected culture. There has been a far-reaching transformation of the general way of life, particularly in how people spend their leisure hours and how they take part in celebratory occasions.
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