APOLOGIA FOR MASS COMMUNICATION

There are few more discredited approaches to history than those that rely on nostalgia. Nostalgia is rightly condemned as bad historiography, and often as a kind of psychological malady. I'm very much 'with' this, and I think there are few things more likely to get me ticked off than a book/article/essay concerning the 'decline' of anything. In particular, I hate it when people talk about the decline of public intellectuals. But that's a whole different thing...

The potentially nostalgic idea I want to introduce here concerns mass communication. In particular, I'm interested in how mass communication may have been very good at doing some things, even if it was very bad at doing other things. We are very much accustomed to the 'bad' things about mass communication. Amongst other things, classic mass communication (think network television in the 1970s, or radio in the 1950s) is critiqued for being a leveling factor, a massifier, a social concretizer (so to speak), and as a top-down force that serves the interests of the (white, monied, U.S.) elites. Almost everyone knows these arguments. Few ideas about mass communication seem to be better distributed than the idea that they are bad because they are dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator sludge.

I suggest that the vantage point of the early 21st century gives a good starting place for understanding what mass communication was (or is, or could have been). To warp Innis, it is only in the gathering dusk that Minerva's owl takes flight. Mass communication is not in the dominant position it was in (okay, that's arguable), and that gives us an opening to understand what mass communication was 'good' at.

So, what was mass communication good at? Perhaps not much. But two things seem apparent to me:

1) Mass communication was good at making publics. Joe Turow has dealt with this for the last 10 years. Implicitly or explicitly, Turow has done a good job showing us how new media are easily used to separate out audiences, thus undermining at least one potential thing that everyone could have in common. It used to be that almost everyone watched Lucille Ball on television and listened to Perry Como. Audiences are now fragmented and temporary collections of networks of people, and the lines between them are drawn up by people who are rewarded for splitting up culture in ways that allow for targeted selling. [brief note: I am occasionally struck by how deep of an influence George Gerbner had on Turow. Very telling in this stuff.]

2) Mass communication was also good at making counter-publics. The idea of the counter-public, as I dimly understand it, comes to us as a kind of elaboration on Habermas' notion of the public sphere. The critique of Habermas for a while was that his ideal of the public sphere didn't allow for the different kinds of oppositional publics that do not share the bourgeois settings or identities of the classic public sphere. [note: I don't want to get into this debate here] One weird thing about mass communication is that, because television and radio stations were so centralized, when there was anything new or different out there, this was relatively significant. To speak metaphorically, something like a two-party system ('dominant' and 'oppositional') became possible. To speak in examples: college and community radio mattered a lot more before the internet. Precisely because of the scarcity of stations, these radio stations were very effective at organizing audiences, and their position in the system of mass communication lent them a decidedly oppositional cast. At the same time that these oppositional radio stations mattered (roughly the 1980s and early 1990s), oppositional television stations were also culturally important. I'm thinking here of Channel Z in L.A., or New York City's whole community access television scene. There was an audience there, and the programmers of these independent stations were instrumental in pulling this freaky audience together.

Now, with internet-based modes of content distribution, the surfeit of 'alternative' voices means that the whole thing has become more muddled. It's the old saw: if everybody's somebody, then nobody's anybody. There are so many voices out there (and so little of a system for sorting them out), that opposition becomes almost meaningless in the cacophony. We've gone from a two-party system (with one party truly dominant) to a billion-option system that has undermined the coordination of cultural opposition. I doubt that this is a permanent or even terribly bad thing. But looking at this purely in terms of how audiences are coordinated, we see a true sense of disorganization in terms of oppositional culture (a culture that, strangely, benefited from its tenuous position in the heyday of mass communication).