I shall assume that we all know what mass
culture is.

Stanley Edgar Hyman, Daedalus

English is a mass medium.

—Edmund Carpenter, Explorations in Communication

 

One way of approaching an evaluation of the mass media is to ask whether it sees the media as an old or a new thing. Are the media regarded as the purveyors of a type of entertainment and information the United States has always known, and which differs now only because of the country’s size and the size of its population? Or are the media taken to be something else entirely, a new land that may not yet have the proper name?

Introduction to Mass Communications,¹ a recent textbook by Edwin Emery, Philip H. Ault, and Warren K. Agee, posits a fairly simple “old” view of the media. The authors sometime suggest that a particular medium (broadcasting, for example) has altered “the basic pattern of American living”; but they are much less interested in estimating the range of such alterations than in showing that the media are little more than the response of an electronic age to the demands, both typical and continual, of a populace for information and entertainment.

The text is designed (as its jacket says) “for one- or two-semester college introductory courses” and (as its authors write) to offer “the general reader a comprehensive picture of the mass media upon which he depends so heavily as a citizen.” When the book discusses movies, it highlights the documentary. Similarly with the other media: it always emphasizes their information-giving or educational functions. Not surprisingly, then, the medium it refers to most often—its “ideal”—is the newspaper, the one medium primarily designed for informing a citizenry.

Any textbook, of course, tends to present an uncomplicated and settled picture of its subject; yet, here, by underplaying the media’s “non-factual” functions, Introduction misrepresents the single function even on which it focuses. Its analysis of newspapers provides a good example of how, when a medium is viewed too simply, major characteristics come to seem minor imperfections.

To Introduction, newspapers are records of the world’s daily events, collections of facts, however incomplete and imperfect. But such a view obscures the additional nuance given to a news story on politics that is printed directly alongside a story on gang wars. Put more broadly: the articles on a newspaper’s page—and especially on its front page—achieve a curious unity just by that placement. Every paper presents to its readers not only a document of daily events, but—merely by being a paper—a way of seeing and experiencing the world (at times, as if it were dadaism’s best creation) with the result that all newspapers function more like novels than like encyclopedias. And they are read more like novels than like encyclopedias. The question which this book should ask, but does not, is: How many readers need look to Dickens if they have the New York Post?

Underlying the approach of Emery, Ault, and Agee is an attitude common to many discussions of the media: that information, facts, and entertainment are all separate absolutes—that information is always information, facts always facts, entertainment always entertainment, and that each is mainly itself. The two items on politics and delinquency are certainly information, but they are something else as well. Exactly what else (or exactly what advertising is, or what the newsreels sandwiched between films are) is the kind of problem that such an “old” stance avoids confronting as it faces today’s media with standards relevant to older forms of communication.

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A directly opposite view of the media can produce its own kind of simplifications. Edgar Morin’s The Stars,² a book about the movies, sees them as a unique product of the 20th century, the end result of a revolution in the desires of its audience, something “new.” According to Morin, the movies at first had only fictional heroes and heroines; then the actors became as well known as the characters they played; and finally in the 30’s—through the accession of the lower class to “the psychological level of middle-class individuality”—“the dialectic of the actor and the role [was] instituted, a machine in which the star descends upon the earth.” “Throughout an immense part of the world, for an overwhelming proportion of the film industry, the movies revolve around a kind of solar performer appropriately called a star.” It is the stars, then, who lure the audience. “Worshipped as heroes, divinized, the stars are more than objects of admiration. They are also subjects of a cult. A religion in embryo has formed around them.” Amidst darkness, screen, and pictures, the magic of the stars holds the viewer.

This argument has some obvious weaknesses. It does not account for the magic of those themes and situations which work without stars—cops and robbers, say—nor for the success of certain directors—Hitchcock, for example (and to name Hitchcock indicates at once the film’s dependence, both for its magic and development, on elements beyond identification with the stars). Not least, the argument also disregards the fact that films are seen. Some of the differences between a “star” of dime novels, like Nick Carter, and a star like Humphrey Bogart are certainly attributable to the simple fact that the first is framed in words and the other in pictures. Stars are not equally radiant on all nights and against every background.

But the most important of Morin’s limitations, because it is the most typical of discussions of the media, is his notion that an audience of fans is the only influential audience the movies have. Morin quotes from interviews with young English and American movie-goers and from some fan letters to demonstrate the passion and extent of “fan fever”; but all such documentation seems beside the point. The movie-goers who worship actors and actresses, thereby transforming them into gods and goddesses, clearly represent only one way of looking at a movie. And the range of distinctions suggested by daily film reviews, and suggested as well by films themselves, indicate that it is by no means the only popular way.

Both these books attempt to analyze how a medium is “used”: Introduction takes the media to be “old” and maintains that they are usually used to fulfill rational—and easily distinguishable—demands for information or entertainment; The Stars, on the other hand, considers the movie medium “new” and argues that it is used to fulfill essentially emotional needs. The difficulty, however, is that neither book examines the differences among the various media. Neither considers how or why an audience may shift from one medium to another as it grows older or more mature; nor whether each medium has a different audience or all media have the same audience; nor whether the different media invite different degrees of participation (are consumers and spectators the same?). And so because of these reasons, neither book can really divine how the media daily manage to affect us—the electronic legions that put pictures in our heads, words in our mouths, and who knows what desires in our hearts.

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A recent issue of Daedalus,³ drawn from the June 1959 Tamiment Institute conference on “Mass Culture and Mass Media,” can be characterized as an attempt by historians, sociologists, social critics, philosophers, media men, and artists to establish—en masse as it were—the necessary context for analyzing the media. Education, high art, taste, national policy, the intellectual—these provide the foci for discussion. Contributors often disagree, sometimes contradict each other, and occasionally speak on different levels; but if Introduction to Mass Communications and The Stars rely on oversimple critical vocabularies, the Daedalus symposium shows how easily the vocabulary can be expanded. The “new/old” alternative, for example, is given some finely shaded nuances.

Edward Shils, discussing “mass society and its culture,” argues that the “unprecedented . . . heart of the revolution of mass culture” lies in the “extraordinary quantity of popular music, mediocre and brutal films, periodical literature, and forms of dance . . . produced for and consumed by youth.” Examining the production and consumption of cultural objects today, he categorizes them as superior, mediocre, or brutal. “In a mass society,” he concludes, somewhat like a Kinsey of culture, “the proportion. . . of cultural objects held by superior culture has shrunk, and correspondingly the share of mediocre and brutal culture has grown.” Yet this shift, he argues, is not so dire as some would have us believe.

The very growth of Kitsch, and of the demand which has generated the industry for the production of Kitsch, is an indication of a crude aesthetic awakening in classes which previously accepted what was handed down to them or who had practically no aesthetic expression and reception.

Whatever may be unique about culture today, then, does not seem cataclysmic to Shils. For him, the new things are not necessarily the central ones: “The problems of superior culture in mass society are the same as in any society.”

Ernest van den Haag disagrees: “In my opinion, emphasis on cultural objects misses the point”—which is not the objects themselves, but the “function of such objects in people’s lives,” the relation to mass culture of the individuals who consume it. And this relationship has, in fact, led to “the corruption and sterilization of the heritage of the past.” For van den Haag, a society that sports a mass culture may be a decaying society; in any case, it is a fundamentally different society from one without such a culture.

According to Norman Jacobs, who edited the Daedalus symposium and wrote a preface to the issue, Ernest Nagel spoke for many people at the Tamiment conference “when he expressed his unhappiness with the quality of much of the evidence introduced to support the various positions.” Nagel’s criticism can be put another way, that the contributors rarely distinguished between statements which were empirically supportable (whether or not evidence for them was available) and those which were not. As a result, any suggestions for research which might add to our understanding of the media remains muted or hidden; and the kinds of questions which might be researchable—how much of popular culture is actually pre-empted by the media? how do movies, as compared with books, work on people?—remain unasked; while abstract issues and moral problems—how great is the danger to high art? can mass culture be controlled?—are overemphasized.

But the more basic difficulty with a collection like this is its failure to establish criteria of relevance. Every essay looks at the subject from another vantage point, and every vantage point seems equally suitable.

Stanley Edgar Hyman’s approach is to ambush the media with multiplicity. “I should like to discuss some of the ideals, dangers, and limitations of mass culture.” The ideals are aesthetic pluralism, natural evolution of taste (an ideal also suggested by Shils), and the media’s rearing of its own critics; the dangers of mass culture are its narcotic effects (one of van den Haag’s points), the cults (folk and hip), and the captivity of the audience; the limitations, finally, are “the Law of Raspberry Jam, that the wider you spread it the thinner it is,” the nature of art itself (which “is always for an elite”), the timidity of the men who run the media, and the consumer’s ignorance. As a college teacher, Hyman proposes to take his stand, or “stands,” before this protean complex on a platform he describes with six operative verbs: reject, embrace, ignore, improve, replace, warn. Hyman, it should be clear, would use the study of mass culture as a device that might lead to both the understanding of past and the creation of new art.

H. Stuart Hughes, on the other hand, argues that the deficiencies of mass culture mirror the deficiencies of society, and he agrees with Shils and others “that the media cannot be held responsible for ‘corrupting’ popular taste.” He writes: “If almost no one cares to read Milton today, it is not just because we have lost our feeling for traditional culture. It is because most of what an author like Milton has to say has in simple truth become irrelevant to our contemporary lives.” Hughes in effect takes a “radical” position as opposed to Hyman’s “liberal” one, for he centers not upon the media’s effect on art, but upon society. With his outlook, as he himself writes, “we have come to social criticism.”

Now these abstractions all have some validity, but they never come together to form a conception under which all the issues involving mass culture and the media might be connected for the purpose of deeper analysis. Disorder may be characteristic of essay collections, but it is worth saying that the media are too often approached through such collections. Going everywhere, as the Daedalus symposium does, they go nowhere.

There are only two books I know of which try to grasp the complexity of the media and the problems they raise by means of a few central ideas. One, published several years ago, did not receive the attention it deserves—Reuel Denney’s The Astonished Muse;⁴ the other, Explorations in Communication,⁵ is a selection of articles from the defunct Canadian magazine, Explorations, which was edited, as is the book, by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Denney considers the media “new”; the contributors to Explorations adopt a more complicated view of the “new/old” question. But taken together, these books form an incisive introduction to the problems of the media and mass culture.

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Denney’s title comes from a line by Emerson: “The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.” But the thousands here do not attend only the muse of the media. Denney places his discussion of the media among analyses of sports, science fiction, cars, urban architecture, the do-it-yourself movement, and consumer buying habits. And so the media come to appear less singularly crucial—less heroes or villains—and, at the same time, come to reveal traits in common with other aspects of popular culture. The Astonished Muse is an attempt to look at the whole of American culture.

The book argues two main propositions, both persuasively. It suggests first that to understand the effects and meanings of popular culture, one must analyze its forms of expression. For it is through form that movies, or science-fiction stories, or sports events establish their basic relationship with an audience. Two of Denney’s best examples for this rather abstract argument deal with football and television.

In a chapter entitled “The Decline of Lyric Sport,” Denney writes: “We must ask . . . how a specific entertainment form—in this sense the form of a game—gets to be what it is.” He approaches the problem by analyzing the rules of American football and comparing them with those of its English counterpart and forebear, Rugby. Denney contends that such factors as the increasingly mixed makeup of American football teams (both socially and ethnically), the democratic ideology of the players (“in favor of equalitarian and codified attitudes”), and football’s audience of former players (unlike Rugby’s audience of non-players)—factors which apply to most American sports—forced the creation of a “game possessing . . . nationally distinct rules”: centering, the minimum yardage-gain rule, the forward pass, etc.

Denney clearly intends this discussion to illuminate the fundamental importance of form for the understanding of any sport. He himself does not bring together the various threads of the discussion, but it seems fair to list them as follows: that form—here the rules of the game—defines and gives meaning to all of a game’s elements—from its physical violence to its intellectual complexity; that the form mediates between the game and the audience by providing common standards according to which the players play and the audience judges; and, finally, that the form expresses certain cultural assumptions which, again, are common to players and audience. Denney in effect is saying that when one attempts to understand the meaning of a sport for its audience, one must investigate the game’s action, its standards, and its cultural significance; and that none of these can be examined without examining the game’s rules.

Denney goes on to argue that form works in much the same way for a medium like television. Here, however, form consists not of rules, but—as in art—of genre. He examines three television programs which were all willing “to arouse popular concern and controversy” by referring to ugly aspects of contemporary life—a film study of the Wassaic School for the Mentally Retarded, a (British) adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, and a documentary-discussion (American) “on the experiences of a seven-year-old girl who had been seized by a sexual pervert”—and he tries to show that their presentations and the audience reactions were determined in each case largely by the genre used. For example, the mixed format of the third program (narrative followed by discussion) expresses an attempt to utilize two distinct ways of handling the same materials, ways that might be categorized roughly as “emotional” and “intellectual,” the idea being that the virtues of the narrative function to offset the inadequacies of the discussion, and vice versa. Denney further suggests that audiences will sometimes accept documentary treatment of a serious theme, although they reject a fictional presenation of it; thus, some members of the BBC audience of 1984 thought that “their broadcasters were wrapping too much seriousness in the format they felt to be reserved for less challenging . . . entertainment.” As with the rules of football, so with the dictates of different artistic genre: each genre (or set of rules) emphasizes different elements of its material, each posits different standards by which the material should be judged, and each genre is viewed by the audience with different expectations.

Appropriate criteria for judgment, implicit cultural attitudes, the relation between elements—the “formal” approach encompasses all these considerations. Denney has outlined here—successfully, I think—the framework within which the complex relations between popular culture and its audience can be untangled without being improperly disjoined.

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This argument, to its credit, does not in itself imply a covert or preconceived judgment on popular culture. Denney’s own estimate is offered in the second of the major propositions he argues in The Astonished Muse—that every area of American popular culture, football no less than the media, suffers from excessive “literalism.”

There seems to be a parallel between the way in which the late nineteenth-century conventions of naturalism control our audio-visual media and the way in which legalities resembling Sherman Antitrust legislation control the American football game. In the one case a literalism of the imagination sets undue limits to both fictional and documentary forms; in the other the elaboration of rules and loopholes concentrates the spectator’s sensibility on conference meetings that resemble sessions of the United Nations.

Denney finds many examples of this literalism, some of them off-beat and unusual, like the bureaucratization of the hot-rod movement which began as an anti-Detroit consumer revolt, or like the architectural vocabulary of “functionalism” which overlooks everything symbolic in the new “supliant skyscrapers” (those monuments “to our desire to re-form the skyscraper in the direction of a display case for anybody rather than a fortress for Somebody”). Denney also sees literalism in motivational research—advertising used to be Utopian, he writes, “it took motives for granted and proposed real or unreal methods, all involving purchase in the market, to satisfy them”; but now cause and effect are reversed, and the product is taken for granted: “what is thought to be mysterious is why anyone should want it, at a certain time, in a certain circumstance, in a certain way.”

Each of these examples points to a different type of literalism; the first touches upon organizational life, the second on aesthetic judgment, and the last on the business world, and the quotation concerning football and the media supplies examples from two other areas of popular culture—sports and audio-visual entertainment. It is no doubt true that the examples are not equally convincing, and that Denney’s judgment depends at times (in his analysis of the media, for instance) upon a kind of “socio-aesthetic” estimate which mixes sociological analysis with assumptions about reality and how it can be represented. But despite these problems, The Astonished Muse still manages to argue with great force that the main tendency of American popular culture is its “tendency towards the literal.”

I should make it clear, however, that Denney’s critical estimate of current popular culture is not at all meant to be an absolute judgment. On the contrary, his general view is extremely affirmative. Toward the close of his final chapter, he writes:

The fine works of scholars like Matthiessen, Parrington, Mumford, and others makes us forget sometimes that a little Concord brightness in the nineteenth century did not save the country from intellectual malfeasance from 1870 to 1917. The 1920’s, great blooming period of the popular arts in the United States, are certainly the greatest decade in our cultural history, notwithstanding recent attempts of post-Marxist and proto-Conservative pygmies to run it down. The Brown, Mauve, and Pea-green decades of the period 1870—1917 had to be ended by a cultural lynching party, it appears, and the trial was summarily conducted by Judge Nickelodeon.

The Astonished Muse is a difficult book to read; sometimes obscure, it is full of sudden shifts and imperfectly developed points (the final sentence of this last quotation is an example). Even so, it is distinguished by something more than the originality of its ideas. For the tone itself of the book is significant, deriving as it does from a recognition that because an American intellectual has an ambiguous relation to popular culture and an inescapable involvement in it, his very estimate of that culture is also a partial estimate of himself. It is the absence of this awareness which marks most of the contributions to the Daedalus symposium and, in general, most evaluations of the media. The Astonished Muse takes on cultural importance precisely because Denney knows that to discuss popular culture is to discuss the meaning of being an American.

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Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, the editors of Explorations in Communication, would probably not find the muse of the media so much astonished by the thousands attending her as exhilarated and, at the same time, very much in charge. For Carpenter and McLuhan believe that the mass media are almost as old as sound or sight, and that today’s media are indeed new but because they are electronic. Whether they have good effects or bad, Carpenter and McLuhan remark, “remains to be seen.”

“All languages,” Carpenter writes, “are mass media,” and it is this assumption that underlay the nine issues of Explorations (published intermittently in Canada between 1953 and 1959). According to Carpenter and McLuhan, “Explorations explored the grammars of such languages as print, the newspaper format and television.” Every medium, it argued—every “language”—structures the message it transmits. Thus, Moby Dick in print differs from Moby Dick on film because print does things which film cannot and, conversely, because film does things which print cannot. Each medium has its own structure, and each its unique limits.

In many ways, Explorations’ notion of “grammars” resembles Denney’s concept of “form.” Both assert that the manner in which a communication is presented determines its meaning and its effect on an audience. But The Astonished Muse and Explorations in Communication investigate different types of “presentation”: Denney mainly discusses different artistic genres, Carpenter and McLuhan different media. Further differences—in emphasis, evidence, and conclusions—flow directly from their focus upon these different enclosures.

Every language, Explorations maintains, codifies reality and conceals, as Carpenter writes, “a unique metaphysics”; moreover, the foremost “languages” of each age, embodying its covert metaphysics, codifies reality for that particular age. It argues this thesis impressionistically with examples from all the arts and from various languages—drawn and animated, as well as spoken. And from this formulation to its main proposition is a quick jump: “that revolutions in the packaging and distribution of ideas and feelings”—changes in the media of communications—“modified not only human relations but also sensibilities” (my italics).

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The first great communications revolution, Explorations contends, was created by the advent of print: oral authority was overthrown and literacy became king. And accompanying the new “language” came nothing less than a new reality, a new world. “The phonetic alphabet and all its derivatives stress a one-thing-at-a-time analytic awareness in perception.” Technology and the assembly line were two inevitable results—“a power of applied knowledge . . . unrivaled in human history.” Every individual was changed and in the most subtle parts of his consciousness; for the price of that unrivaled power, of the loss of the oral language, the price of print, was to exist “personally and socially in a state of almost total subliminal awareness.”

Now, once again, a great communications revolution is restructuring the world. Print is being overthrown, and its lineal order is dying; and the all-at-once reality of the electronic media is upon us. This re-orientation can be described as the shift from the line to the gestalt, from ordered time to “spherical” space, from the inductive logic of the lawyer’s brief to the simultaneity of talk; and “paradoxically, at this moment in our culture, we meet once more preliterate man.” The new reality we have entered is the “postliterate age”:

Postliterate man’s electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone knows about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens.

Some of this has been said before, but the effects Carpenter and McLuhan see of such all-at-onceness upon human relations and sensibilities are less noted. The “simultaneous sharing of experiences as in a village or tribe creates a village or tribal outlook, and puts a premium on togetherness.” “Today we are experiencing the emotional and intellectual jag resulting from the rapid translation of varied visual and auditory media into one another’s modalities,” This transition affects education: “the present conflict leads to elimination of the motive to learn and to diminution of interest in all previous achievement: it leads to loss of the sense of relevance.”

What is happening to us, in short, is the obverse of what a preliterate society experiences in the transition to literacy: “Just as the Eskimo has been de-tribalized via print, going in the course of a few years from primitive nomad to literate technician, so we, in an equally brief period, are becoming tribalized via electronic channels.”

The essays by the contributors to Explorations in Communication, which examine a variety of subjects in a variety of ways—S. Giedion’s “Space Conception in Prehistoric Art,” Dorothy Lee’s “Linguistic Reflection of Wintu Thought” and “Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality” (and Robert Graves’s comments on the latter), Jean Shepard’s “Channel Cat in the Middle Distance” are several examples—all manage to give support to the general framework provided by Carpenter and McLuhan.

There are any number of possible objections to this argument: one might contend that print is not dying, while conceding that the media are indeed creating important changes within the younger generation’s conception of reality; that no form of communication is so central to the development and utilization of knowledge (or art) as this book argues; that the categories of preliterate, literate, and postliterate describe real enough differences, but that they are only a by-product of more significant forces. Yet the questions raised by Explorations in Communication are serious ones, and their precise validity to one side, they serve to make us aware of what the media may in general be, and of how, as always, they continue to affect our thoughts and our sensibilities.

Yet if Explorations is right in thinking that print is obsolescent, then it seems to have lost its best chance for a graceful exit; for had Explorations been the last book published, the final act of literacy could then have been a recognition of its own mortality. But no doubt such an orderly and “lineal” fantasy is the product of an imagination that has itself been nurtured by too many lines of tight, straight, and endlessly marching print.

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¹ Dodd, Mead & Company, 435 pp., 1960.

² Translated from the French by Richard Howard. Grove Press, 189 pp., 1960.

³ Spring, 1960.

⁴ University of Chicago Press, 264 pp., 1957.

⁵ Beacon Press, 210 pp., 1960.