mass-communication-theory

INSTANT ACCESS
Mass Society Theory
Strengths Weaknesses
1. Speculates about important effects
2. Highlights important structural changes and
conflicts in modern cultures
3. Draws attention to issues of media ownership
and ethics
Chapter 3 The Rise of Media Industries and Mass Society Theory 67
1. Is unscientific
2. Is unsystematic
3. Is promulgated by elites interested in preserving
power
4. Underestimates intelligence and competence of
“average people”
5. Underestimates personal, societal, and cultural
barriers to direct media influence
growing concern for the declining strength of common morality (Ritzer, 1983,
p. 99). People were no longer bound by traditional values, but were free to follow
their personal passions and needs. Durkheim believed that these problems were
best viewed as social pathologies that could be diagnosed and cured by a social
physician—in other words, a sociologist like himself (Ritzer, 1983, p. 110). Unlike
conservatives who demanded a return to old social orders or radicals who called
for revolution, Durkheim believed that scientifically chosen reforms would solve
the problems inherent in modernity.
MASS SOCIETY THEORY IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES
Although mass society theory has very little support among contemporary mass
communication researchers and theorists, its basic assumptions of a corrupting media
and helpless audiences have never completely disappeared. Attacks on the pervasive
dysfunctional power of media have persisted and will persist as long as
dominant elites find their power challenged by media and as long as privately
owned media find it profitable to produce and distribute content that challenges
widely practiced social norms and values. Two contemporary writers provide clear
articulations of mass society theory as it is now expressed. In addition to modernizing
mass society notions, they amply demonstrate mass society theory’s many
limitations (for example, distrust of “average people” and the presumption that
the authors’ values are the “right values”). Michael Medved in Hollywood vs.
America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (1992) argues precisely
what the title implies: American culture has declined because “the gatekeeper/cleric
has wandered away and the carnival barker/programmer has taken
his place” (p. 3). You may remember Medved from Chapter 2 as the film critic
who uncovered the homosexual agenda, environmentalism, disdain for the human
race, and support for the United Nations in the 2007 animated movie Happy Feet.
In Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children from the National Assault on Innocence,
he warned that “nihilistic messages that frighten and corrupt now come at
our children from so many directions at once that childhood innocence barely
stands a chance” (Medved and Medved, 1998, p. 3).
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