mass-communication-theory

320 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Communication Theory
and old elements are abandoned. This change doesn’t typically happen because it’s
planned by an elite who manipulates culture to serve its interests. Rather, culture
changes as situations in which communities act change.
Many of the most productive symbolic interactionists were, like Mead, located
at the University of Chicago. They became known as the Chicago School. We discussed
the Chicago School in Chapter 5 when we considered the argument they
made concerning social responsibility of the press. These ideas, pragmatism and social
interactionism, were at the heart of that normative theory.
Chicago School theorists in the 1920s saw the city that housed their campus
as a gigantic social experiment—a place where many folk cultures were suddenly
thrown together in situations where people were forced to understand and relate
to others whose culture was very different from their own. They used the term
great community to refer to Chicago. It’s useful to contrast this term with another
used quite a bit in this textbook: mass society. The difference highlights
some key differences between pragmatism and mass society theory—between a
theory that’s optimistic about the future of large-scale social orders and one
that’s quite pessimistic. Mass society theorists worried that individuals would become
“atomized” in large-scale social orders. The networks of social relationships
holding people together would necessarily break down as people moved
from rural communities to urban ghettos. High culture would give way to mass
culture so people’s existence would be degraded and dehumanized. Media would
just make things worse by providing a more efficient mechanism for transmitting
mass culture.
If mass societies are places where human existence is degraded, great communities
are places where the potential for human existence is explored and new opportunities
for developing culture are found. One of the most creative members of the
Chicago School was Robert E. Park, a man who worked as a journalist, studied
philosophy with John Dewey in Michigan and sociology with Georg Simmel in
Germany, exposed colonialism in the Belgian Congo, and served as an aide to educator,
author, and early African American civil rights leader Booker T. Washington
(Goist, 1971). With his colleagues, Park developed a perspective on urban life that
was essentially optimistic while at the same time acknowledging that there were
many problems. Cities were places where new forms of culture could be created—
where many new and dynamic communities could be formed. Cities were made up
of thousands of more or less interconnected local communities. It is this interconnection
that allows for or compels the creation of more innovative forms of
culture.
Not surprisingly, Park saw newspapers as playing an essential role in interconnecting
the communities making up great communities. The most important thing
about the newspaper, he thought, was that it served as a means of transmitting
“news.” This was an example of a
non-spatially defined, yet community-oriented phenomenon which functioned to hold
the larger society together. The news, as Park presented it, played the dual role—
making communication within the local area possible, but also acting to integrate individuals
and groups into the wider society. He illustrated his point by indicating the
function of the immigrant press. The effect of city life is to destroy the provincialism
of the immigrant, and the foreign-language newspaper is the chief means of replacing
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