Mass Communication and Society - Essay Example

of Mass Communication and Society Compared to societies passed, contemporary society is a very complex and advanced one. Traditionally it was the case that the overwhelming majority of the population of a given society was illiterate. Those who could read and write held much power because they had unique access to information, records, and documents. This small percentage of humanity, composed of scribes, nobles, and other elite, had since the Neolithic Revolution 10,000 years dominated the power structures and institutions of society. To us today, it is tempting to ask why societies with early writing systems accepted the ambiguities that restricted writing to a few functions and a few scribes. But even to pose that question is to illustrate the gap between ancient perspectives and our own expectations of mass literacy….As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was ‘to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.’ (Diamond 1999, p. 235) The esoteric nature of knowledge, based as it was on controlling the number of people who could read and write, was a classical feature throughout most of human history. This changed in the modern era with the advent of mass literacy. Towards the end of the nineteenth century many Western societies began educate their masses - that is the poorer sections of the population. The immediate effect of this was to change what had hitherto been typical: the average person could now read and write. This radically changed the nature of power. As the scholar Ernest Gellner has put it: [A] society has emerged based on a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labor, and sustained, frequent, and precise communication between strangers involving a sharing of explicit meaning, transmitted in a standard idiom and in writing when required…Universal literacy and a high level of numerical, technical, and general sophistications are among its functional prerequisites. (Gellner 1983, p. 34-35) Thus in modern society virtually everyone is literate and has access to knowledge which was previously denied them. With mass literacy came mass communications. Newspapers and journals no longer only spoke to a learned minority; they could and did preach their stories and narratives to the masses now able to understand them. Now that the masses could no longer be controlled by maintaining their ignorance, it came as little surprise that societal power players (governments, corporate heads, bureaucrats, politicians, etc.) began to instead attempt to manipulate people by controlling the nature and flow of information. The ability to speak to all through a newspaper or a speech1 became a new means to power. All that was needed was some means of gaining everyone’s attention. One such method was and is fear-mongering. By appealing to each person’s basic fear of death, power brokers could and can speak to the masses and manipulate them. This fear can be easily channeled to more nefarious ends. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once put it: “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd” (Fear 2009). An excellent case in point of those in power appealing to people’s fear via the nation’s airwaves, newspapers, and television stations centers around the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, the reasons cited to justify it, and the public’s perceptions of those same reasons. During a press conference President Bush held in the days during America’s March 2003 military action he made reference to the attacks of September 11 a total of eleven times. “He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11” (Feldman 2003). This decision by Bush to link 9/11 with Iraq was no mistake. The 2001 terrorist attacks stand as a moment forever etched in the collective memory of all Americans in the same way that the Kennedy assassination and the Pearl Harbor attacks stood out in the minds of people of generations passed. People felt outrage at the attacks in New York and, as Russell adumbrated, herd instinct largely took over. This most likely explains the country’s support for the invasion of Afghanistan. When Bush sought to link the invasion of Iraq with 9/11, he was hoping to appeal to that herd instinct in order to apply it to a different cause and thus end. As history has shown, nothing binds people together like war. As time has shown, the stated reasons which the Bush administration gave to justify its invasion of Iraq have largely been shown to have been completely unfounded. Retrospectively, this means that Bush’s decision to link the war effort in Iraq to 9/11 was a completely shameful and potentially criminal one. In his book The Assault on Reason, former Vice President Al Gore had the following to say regarding the public’s perception and memory of the events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq : It is a serious indictment of the present quality of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of all Americans were so easily led to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, and that so many Americans still believe that most of the hijackers on September 11 were Iraqis. And it is an indictment of the way our democracy is currently operating that more than 40 percent of Americans were so easily convinced that Iraq did in fact have nuclear weapons, even after the most important evidence presented – classified documents that depicted an attempt by Saddam Hussein’s regime to purchase yellowcake uranium from the country of Niger – was revealed to have been forged. (Gore 2007, p. 25-26) Corporate owned media of all kinds (TV, newspapers, magazines) all propagated the Bush administration’s story regarding its desire to invade with little or no countervailing opinion. The effect was that the country’s media (that is mass media) spread a narrative to the American people which was completely false and which was later shown to be known to be false by the very people who originated it. The implications of this for modern society are as obvious as they are grave. In a society in which most can read and intelligibly speak to one another, the power wielded by the disseminators of information is extremely great and thus hugely susceptible to being manipulated by those intent on having their version of events told to the public. This top-down paradigm for the distribution of knowledge, and thus power, is a prominent feature of modern society. Gone are the days when tyrants only had to control the masses’ access to weapons and their freedom to move between places. Today those in power must revert to more sophisticated methods. These methods depend on the existence of mass communication. This mass communication, historically speaking, has an unprecedented capacity to control people’s knowledge, attitude, and perceptions of the world, the “truth”, and their elected leaders and government. The elite wasted no time in seizing the moment. References Diamond, Jared 1999, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton & Company, New York. Fear Quotes (Website) 2009, Available at: < http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_fear.html> Feldman, Linda 2003, ‘The Impact of Bush Linking 9/11 and Iraq’, The Christian Science Monitor, [Online] Available at: < http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html> Gellner, Ernest 1983, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, New York. Gellner, Ernest 1988, Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gore, Al 2007, The Assault on Reason, The Penguin Press, New York. Read More