Mass Communication
The ‘Mass’ in Mass Communication
What do we mean by “mass”? A buzzword in the modern digital era, this simple designation has a long and highly debated history. Read on to trace the journey of this ubiquitous term.
By Lakshmi Prabha
Anyone interested in the subject of mass communication has to first come to terms with the many meanings of the concept ‘mass’. The popular understanding of the term is that of a medium that can communicate to a large and widely dispersed audience. This is an often taken-for-granted meaning and also in the past has often worked as a pejorative for critics of modern capitalist society and culture.
The concept however is much subtler than this simplistic reduction. It is a concept that has grown along with the growth of the academic discipline, the growth of media technology that it studied and the growth of media institutions that produced messages. We can begin by saying that the mass is a very social phenomenon.
Mass as a group of people
Though the discipline of mass communication was a child of the twentieth century, to perceive the concept of mass we go back over to the 19th century. Gustave Le Bon made a perception of the ‘mass’ in Psychologie des Foules, published in 1895, a treatise of crowd behavior in Western societies that had undergone industrialisation. In the wake of rapid industrialisation LeBon perceives the birth of a ‘mass’, a collective that is capable of being moved by collective impulses. The primary responsibility of delivering these impulses lay on the newspapers and the medium of newspapers in turn gave rise to ever-shifting opinions regarding political and social life. This is the point at which newspapers came to be seen as a catalyst of rousing the masses through the formulation of an opinion.
Gabriel Tarde’s concept of mass was partly inspired by the ideas of Le Bon, who was his contemporary. Tarde sought to answer a more philosophical question. How is it that a geographically dispersed multitude of individuals are capable of forming any kind of social bond by the act of reading the newspaper? In answer to this question, Tarde formulated the idea of the ‘public’, an artificial grouping that was defined by some common interest and developed out of the crowds. A public possessed an opinion, and a person simultaneously became part of many different publics and hence had recourse to many different opinions. Tarde suggested that the newspaper was a major medium of public communication. Tarde’s conception of the mass was refined by the presence of a plurality of opinionated publics. It is worth noting that both Le Bon and Tarde’s categorization of mass, acknowledged the presence of a perceivable group of people.
Robert E Park of the Chicago School of Communication who studied collective behavior, goes on to explain modern journalism and advertising as currents of public opinion. From Le Bon to Park, we see that the idea of the masses starts to be closely related to the dissemination of public opinion to a group of people. Park’s contemporary Charles Horton Cooley suggested that there exists a sort of collective behavior distinct from the crowd or the publics, which could be called a ‘mass’. By this time, the concept of ‘mass’ came to be a definitive sociological category. In the works of George Simmel we came to see that the mass became a unity sharing similar ideas, spaces or setting. Up until the time of Simmel we get to observe that it was notions of tradition, religion, social movements and political affairs that became useful in interpreting the term mass. With the turn of the century, as the sociotechnical systems of the society developed in complexity, the mass came to be explained through a different lens.
Mass as an effect of communication
The great wars of the twentieth century drove scholars to think of how people consuming different kinds of media messages could be behooved to war. Propaganda became a foundational concept that swayed the analysis of mass communication and its intended and unintended effects on the masses. Analyzing how propaganda could mislead people, Walter Lippmann made the observation that new mass communication technologies were creating mass disillusionment. For Lipmann who studied the psychological effects of mass communication, the mass was a large group of people who were manipulated through communication to act and think in a certain way. Lippmann’s concerns with the potential for mass media to mislead people were also shared by Karl Mannheim. Mannheim saw the masses as an active force who were enmeshed in various networks of communication in contrast to the organic passive masses of the traditional societies. His conception of the politically active masses arose from the observation he made of Nazi Germany and the huge electoral support that they enjoyed since their takeover of Germany. Lippmann and Mannheim shared the conviction that the ‘mass’ was a group on whom the ‘effects’ of communication had a psychological hold.
Mass as consumers of culture
The preoccupation with propaganda soon faded and was reinvested in mass culture. The early twentieth century was characterized by the mass society theory view that the society was composed of elites and workers. Intellectual elites upset by the proliferation of products of the mass cultural industry were the first to establish a difference between elite culture and mass culture. As echoed in the works of Jose Ortega y Gasset, cultural consumption by the masses exhibited a dilution of tastes. These masses consumed cultural products that ‘were tasteless, artificial and ordinary’. F.R. Leavis cites as a symptom of this mass taste the ‘abridgement of canonical works and their adaptation for movies or even comic strips’. Much commentary about the ‘massness’ of culture however failed to define what exactly mass culture was. Instead useful shortcuts for its identification from traditional highbrow culture were provided. According to these shortcuts provided by theoreticians there came to be an audience - a middle mass of cultural consumers - for whom a dumbed down culture was palatable. We see here that in these overtures that the mass came to be a group determined by the quality of their cultural products.
The influences of mass culture became a matter of study, with the proliferation of the cultural industries. Herbert Blumer took up the task of defining the mass, by studying movie-goers at a time when movies were far more important a medium of entertainment than they are today. He observed that ‘the mass becomes a homogenous unit only with respect to their movie-going behaviour’ whereas for all other social and practical purposes they remain heterogeneous. The mass then, according to Blumer, is not a particular stratum of the society but rather a unity that arises from a collective behavior and dissipates soon after.
Borrowing from the works on mass audience by Blumer, in 1953 sociologist Eliot Freidson outlined what he perceived to be the predominant definition of mass communication, which included four distinguishing features for the mass audience:
- it is heterogeneous in composition
- it is composed of individuals who do not know each other
- the members of the mass are spatially separated
- mass has no definite leadership and very loose organization.
One of the earliest scholars of communication who referred to mass communication in an indirect way was Harold D Lasswell in his studies of propaganda. He suggests that the capacity to reach out simultaneously to masses was quite limited before the advent of print, moving images and radio. The hypodermic needle theory or the magic bullet theory attributed to Lasswell, conceives the presence of mass passively receiving media messages. In the two-step flow theory of Paul Lazarfeld too, the mass is present, though it is mediated by an opinion leader. The concept of mass was rooted in communication scholarship and was characterized by the presence of a large number of people and mass communication was the capacity to reach out to a diverse and dispersed audience with the help of modern technology .
By the middle of the 20th century ‘mass’ then was a feature of modern society, a feature that was realized with the help of modern technology. At the same time The Chicago School of communication, influenced by the writings of Ferdinand Tonnies, found that the nature of communication in modern societies was characterized by a ‘connected disconnectedness’ or ‘disconnected connectedness’. This was a vantage point which motivated later scholars to view mass communication as a meaningful and analytical category used for describing audiences, societies and forms of cultural production.
A parallel line of thought in mass communication had developed in the mid-nineteenth century that was recognized by its mathematical definition of mass communication. The Shannon-Weaver model of communication saw communication as transmission of messages. Though the model was developed for personal communication it came to be used to study mass communication as well. The defining moment for mass communication came in 1954, when Wilbur Schramm published the Schramm's Model of Communication. Schramm identified that the hallmark of mass communication was the ability to reach a large number of people and with this the concept of ‘mass’ was more or less fixed to mean a large number of people. The later decades, beginning from the 1960s, was a waning period for mass communication. In the 1990s the field gained renewed speed with the advent of interactive forms of communication.
Mass communication in the age of new media
The relevance of the concept of mass is challenged by the age of digital reason. One can say that humanity has transitioned from mass communication to mass computing. The communication dynamic represented in the Web 2.0 field sees the sender and the receiver of the message on an equal footing. Communication is much more egalitarian and terms like ‘prosumer’ and ‘produsage’ signal that message production and distribution have migrated beyond traditional paradigms.
Perhaps Manuel Castells’ notion of the Network Society sufficiently highlights the networked nature of life. Human social, cultural and political activities have become colonized by digital logic. The nature of the audience too has transformed from being a receiver of messages to one who performs active digital labour. The mass is no more a viable concept for characterizing the communication scenarios of the new media world. It is best to borrow from the work of Maneul Castells and say that communication is undergoing a rhizomatic revolution and that the mass has been displaced by rhizomes in the networked world.
The conclusion to this piece of writing is easy, that mass is an elusive concept and to pin it down would take us from sunrise to sunset. Nevertheless we can strive to perceive it as a large group of people with a particular communicative behaviour, a large group of people receiving a media message, or a large group of people consuming a particular culture or simply a capacity of a medium to reach out to large groups.