mass-communication-theory

68 Section 2 The Era of Mass Society and Mass Culture
But mass society theory’s most influential contemporary champion may well be
British social critic, philosopher, and intellectual Roger Scruton. In An Intelligent
Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (2000), he makes clear mass society’s elitism
and support of elite culture:
This book presents a theory of modern culture, and a defense of culture in its higher
and more critical form. It is impossible to give a convincing defense of high culture to
a person who has none. I shall therefore assume that you, the reader, are both intelligent
and cultivated. You don’t have to be familiar with the entire canon of Western
literature, the full range of musical and artistic masterpieces or the critical reflections
which all these things have prompted. Who is? But it would be useful to have read Les
fleurs du mal by Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. I shall also presume some
familiarity with Mozart, Wagner, Manet, Poussin, Tennyson, Schoenberg, George
Herbert, Goethe, Marx, and Nietzsche. (p. x)
Scruton also weighs in on the decline of traditional values: “Something new
seems to be at work in the contemporary world—a process that is eating away the
very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue,
but by putting everything—virtue included—on sale” (p. 55).
On popular culture:
Pop culture is … an attempt to provide easy-going forms of social cohesion, without
the costly rites of passage that bring moral and emotional knowledge. It is a culture
which has demoted the aesthetic object, and elevated the advert in its place; it has
replaced imagination by fantasy and feeling by kitsch; and it has destroyed the old
forms of music and dancing, so as to replace them with a repetitious noise, whose
invariant harmonic and rhythmic textures sound all about us, replacing the dialect of
the tribe with the grammarless murmur of the species, and drowning out the unconfident
stutterings of the fathers as they trudge away towards extinction. (p. 121)
And on the failings of higher education:
The gap between the culture acquired spontaneously by the young, and that which …
should be imparted in the university, is so cavernously wide that the teacher is apt to
look ridiculous, as he perches on his theatrical pinnacle and beckons the youth across
to it. Indeed, it is easier to make the passage the other way, to join your young audience
in the enchanted field of popular entertainment, and turn your intellectual guns
on the stately ruin across the chasm. (pp. 121–122)
Beyond the ongoing concern of those who see “traditional values” and average
people jeopardized by new communication technologies, two other factors
have given new, albeit weak, life to current rearticulations of mass society theory.
The first is the phenomenally rapid diffusion of the Internet and the World Wide
Web; the second is changes in the way media companies are structured and
operated.
New forms of media, in this case the Internet and Web, mean new forms of
communication, which mean the development of new relationships and the creation
of new centers of power and influence. You’ll recognize this as a near mirror
image of the situation that faced our society during the nineteenth and into the
early twentieth century, the incubation period of mass society theory. Today, in
many parts of the world, advances in media technology facilitate the formation of
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