The media as an extended form of the social – the rise of ‘mass media’
The massive changes wrought by the industrial revolutions that have
unevenly transformed the developing world have represented important
preconditions to the formations of populations living in conditions of den-
sity whilst at the same time connected by the framework of the nation-state.
The sheer scale of population increases within modern nation-states com-
bined with the migration of people from pastoral regions to cities has
created metropolitan densities conducive to the maturing of so-called ‘mass
society’. Infrastructures necessary to service such growth have led to the
mass production of transport and goods, the mass delivery of education
and of course the ‘mass media’ (see Giddens, 1990; Thompson, 1995).
In the period of the breakdown of traditional societies characterized
by a high intensity of integration by religion, the fragmentation of nation-
ally framed polities by way of urbanization, the separation of individuals
from feudal means of production and the creation of labour-power as a
commodity collectively gave rise to a range of perspectives on the ‘massi-
fication’ of society ranging from mass/elite frameworks to liberal-pluralist
ones.^2
The mass/elite framework had its most salient beginnings from the
1930s onwards, which was also the time when the media were first
‘mapped out as a field of study in a formal or academic sense’ (Bennett,
1982: 38). It was at this time that the co-emergence of cinema and radio
combined with rising unemployment and mass armies of disposable
workers which culminated in the Great Depression. What all of these
frameworks have in common is the idea that the masses once formed by
the aforementioned disintegrations are, in late modernity, in need of a
mechanism of incorporation for social integration to occur. This may be
politically, by way of the gradual enfranchisement of successive groups,
or economically, by, for example, the law of value operating in the
market to facilitate equivalence between labour-power and commodities.
At the same time, however, the mass society framework of the 1930s gave
rise to a concern for ‘effects analysis’ which focused on ‘stimulus’ and
‘response’ and the influence that ‘the media’, deemed to be somehow
external to the formation of a person’s identity, comes to exert over that
identity and culture in general.^3 These studies oscillated between cele-
brating the media as agents of the education of the masses to condemn-
ing them for hypodermically injecting audiences with ‘propaganda’.^4
Most of the empirical research was concerned with what people ‘think’
as a result of being influenced by the media. On some rare occasions, the
‘mass psychology’ of the media was also studied, such as when, in 1938,
H.G. Wells’ famous novel The War of the Worlds was broadcast in radio
form on CBS, resulting in the now difficult to understand apocalyptic
hysteria over a Martian invasion.Theories of Broadcast Media 21Holmes-02.qxd 2/15/2005 2:04 PM Page 21