‘Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts es : ae ‘useful e the general indictment of the mass i is Fee caiarany ons person would adhere to all of them, society following could rather be regarded as the doctrines of an ‘ imaginary composite critic of mass culture. 1. Power Power is concentrated in a few hands, and methods of maintaining it have been refined by the techniques of manipulation. Armies of people are employed to test and analyse, to seek out needs and hidden desires and to create needs where they do not already exist: Before high-pressure salesmanship, emphasis was upon the salesman’s knowledge of the product, a sales knowledge grounded in apprenticeship; after it, the focus is upon hyponotizing the prospect, an art provided by psychology. C. Wright Mills, White Collar But the ethics of salesmanship have infected every area of life. Politics has becomea branch of publicrelations. Persuasion has been substituted for debate and the search for the right image has replaced the search for the right policy. 2. Mass production Cultural products are mass produced to a formula that allows no place for creativity. Experiment and growth have been replaced by gimmicks and fashion. Mass production demands an audience so large that it can only be held together by appeals to people’s most unthinking responses: meinen we are dealing with figures like this, we are no longer considering @ ever hon nce at all: it has ceased to be an audience, in the sense that one can ay, oe focommunicate with a majority ofit in any but the most superficial Henry Fairlie, Encounter, March 1962 3. Consumers People are not eS : what others stories Thee nts in the society but as consumers of ir needs and attitud re assessed : ‘itudes as consumers @) and analysed but their Judgement as men and women is notMASS SOCIETY THEORY 61 called upon. They are asked to distinguish between washin not whether they would prefer schools to strip clubs, Theis and they play no part in the world of decision-making, T persuasion can be soft and subtle but when the persuade other it becomes harsh and aggressive. The people are exploitation: 8 powders but role is passive he language of T's speak to each ‘masses’ awaiting ‘To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people, There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses, ..'The fact in surely, that a way of seeing other people which has become characteristn sp our kind of society, has been capitalized for the purposes of political or cultural exploitation. Raymond Williams, Culture and ‘Society 4. The pseudo-world Increasingly the media define our sense of reality and organize our experience into stereotypes. We cease to believe in events until the media sanction them. We come to believe more in the pictures of life than in life itself and in the end may accept the distorting mirror of the media as a portrait of our true selves: The studio audience, I should say, provides the perfect image of mid-20th century democracy. At the time of Suez, I saw a photograph of troops by the Canal, all looking very glum, except for one small party, which was being televised: thumbs up and smiling, as required. Malcolm Muggeridge, New Statesman, 14 February 1959 5. The unambiguous world Mass culture makes us more alike. It does this not merely by manu- facturing standardized products but by trivializing the important things until they are reduced to the level of the commonplace. Magazine pages and television programmes flicker past us—religion and quiz games, criticism and gossip columns, art lovers and animal lovers, all cemented by colourful advertising. Communication and salesmanship become inextricably intertwined, so that there is a continuous blurring of distinctions: Not alll celebrities have equal value and the same symbolic status. simple fact is the basis for one of Mr Murrow’s most fascinating wil s to Person consists of two ‘visits’ on the same night, and he strives for He congruity rather than harmony. An early programme epitomized ee strategy—Krishna Menon and one of the Gabor sisters ee me hour. Such a juxtaposition, while it tickles our fancy, also manages to This srson62 MASS SOCIETY THEORY distinction between the meaning of a Krishna Menon and a Gabor; by gy both equal valueit trivialize the significance ofone....ifyouthmnn aknat Menon in with a Gabor, bill the entire ‘package’ as entertainment, ang sate by way of television, you have gone a long way towards creating an image. an unambiguous world. Sy Maeey Hausknecht, ‘The Mike in the Bosom’ in Mase Gila 6. The break with the past Mass culture destroys folk art, dehydrates popular art and threatens fine art. It has little sense of tradition, of values being modified by change. Instead there is an obsession with fashion and novelty; to be the latest thing is thought in itself a sufficient recommendation, sad arnt People are subjected to a sustained and ever-increasing bombard. ment of invitations to assume that whatever is, is right so long as it is widely attaches itself, that of ‘progressivism’. Progressivism assists living for the present by disowning the past; but the present is enjoyed only because, andso long as, it is the Present, the latest and not the out-of-date past; so, as each new ‘present’ comes along, the others are discarded. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy 7. Corruption of the feelings The media exploit rather than satisfy our needs and desires. Not only are appeals made to our Worst instincts, such as greed and snobbery, but our best aot ted distorted and our finest feelings squandered on objects Person, the Manin the Hed sd ote ecg : eds heads so that in the end the inn 20 in fear of the Mass Man, the monstetMASS SOCIETY THEORY as ‘The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mi place mind, knowing tobe commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights often place and to impose them wherever it wil. common- Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses 9. The cult of personality In an age of conformity, in which the mass replaces a community of publics, a substitute for true individuality is found in the glorification of personality. This emphasizes not what a man is or what he has done but his image, his public face. The stars of the world of show business have taken over, and in politics grooming the personality becomes as important as brushing up the facts: I wish men who call themselves public relations counsellors and have three coronets on their notepaper would stop ringing me up and saying in carried- away voices: ‘Decca have just signed Fannie Bloggs. She’s receiving the Press at the Savoy, 5.30.’ I wish that after I have told the men with the three coronets to drop dead, I could come back from lunch and not find a note from my secretary saying Decca have just signed Fannie Bloggs... . By the time I get to the Savoy, I find that Fannie Bloggs, whom nobody ever heard of before that morning, is already famous, anyway. Or as good as. Next morning some hay-haired girl, grasping a guitar by the throat leers up at you from the breakfast table. Unconsciously you start to believe in her, reasoning innocently that since her picture is in the paper she’s sufficiently important to have her picture in the paper. a ‘That's all Fannie needs. With this aberration of logic, which works time after time in our purblind community, the men with the three coronets have you nailed. Leslie Mallory, quoted in the News Chronicle 10. Escape from reality The audience receives the products of the mass media, and is encouraged to receive them, in a state of dream-like passivity: ture? But still, there Why encourage the art that is destined to replace literal is a kind of soggy attraction about it. To sit onthe padded seat 0 smoke-scented darkness, letting the flickering drivel on con re overwhelm you—feeling the waves ofits silliness lap you rar ata ae todrown, intoxicated, in a viscous sea—after all it'sthe kind need. ‘The . Seat atie Say Riese ee ae Keep the Aspidistra Flying64 MASS SOCIETY THEORY The media provide us with an endless series of dreams throu, ek can escape from the reality of the world and ourselves, We ae ar We identify ourselves with fictitious characters whose conflicts are Be e 2 by magical solutions, and to indulge in corroding fantasies: otved ‘his car is very personal property: once you get the feel oft, you wo to hold back. Behind the wheel a man feels power—and’a won wat freedom. Turn the Key and fel the Capri spring to life, gliding ier ay hugging the road, clinging to the curves, responding instantly. qqeut’h elegant extension of your own personality. and (advertisement) These ten points make up an unambiguous indictment. Before we proceed to set other points of view against this, the words of the late C, Wright Mills might be quoted as a general summary: - ‘The media tell the man in the mass who he is—they give him identity, They tell him what he wants to be—they give him aspirations. They tell him how to get that way — they give him technique. ‘They tell him how to feel that he is that way even when he is not—they give him escape. The Power Elite