The Media System in America I

Knowledge is not always power, but is the best insurance we have against powerlessness. And to be more effective than we have been in bending the mass media to our purposes, we must learn much more than we now know about our system of mass communication. It ought to be a basic prerequisite in all, but English teacher training especially ought to include at last a one-semester course in careful analysis of the scholarly literature about mass communication. For those already teaching, a bibliography of the best current literature is appended (A).

One note of caution about this literature. In the best tradition of science, it does not pretend to show cause and effect or claim the ability to predict and control on fragmentary or unrepresentative evidence. This is as it should be, and we can learn a great deal about scientific method from this very tentativeness, even diffidence, with which social scientists present their analyses of mass media effects. They insist that it is rarely if ever possible to show that a program caused a delinquent act, or even that long exposure to a certain admittedly trivial or uninspiring genre was responsible for what we generally consider undesirable behavior.

But what rarely is emphasized in such discussions is that media monopoly of time and interest may be keeping other agencies of judgment or instruction from so achieving their effects that the undesirable actions might be significantly displaced by personal and social growth. In other words, social science research is not very (if at all) helpful in discussing ignored alternatives, missed chances, unused opportunities for maturing. It is quite proper for social scientists to show us how selective perception keeps the media from significantly changing opinions (Democrats tune out Republican slogans; children don't hear Howdy Doody's one quiet appeal to read books because SKOOB ERA NUF, backwards). But this does not even face the larger issue of whether people would pursue more rewarding goals were they not transfixed by the media.

That is where the artist is still supremely valuable to us, for his intuitions outrace the slow methodology of the scientist, and sometimes his intuitions are all we (who must act now) have. For example, no social science study I know contradicts the essential truth of Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty," in which the arrested adolescents go to any movie on Saturday night for sheer lack of anything better to do, or in which Marty's pals, brainwashed by those very movies, can't see why the hero would find anything to love in a plain and gangly high school chemistry teacher.

Social scientists also insist that mass communication doesn't affect people directly, but by a "two-step flow" process, affects them through the opinion leaders in their primary groups-family, church, neighborhood friends, classroom associates. But this phenomenon does not paralyze the imaginative teacher dissatisfied with the low standards of mass communication; he finds ways to involve parents in his media strategies by giving homework assignments, to involve church leaders by organizing community-leader watchdog groups to assess the level of local media, and by using the peer group relationship in the classroom to be productive of higher adolescent standards, e.g., by popular arts criticism written by students for bulletin boards and school papers.

So as much as we must respect what the social scientists have taught us about the process of mass communication in the past generation, we must never admit that their mode of apprehending the protean reality of mass communication exhausts our resources. We can still use our own judgment in assessing how media affect our purposes as classroom teachers, and we can search out the many different kinds of artists who use cartoons, essays, fiction, verse, and drama to judge the ongoing effects of massive communication on American values.

THE NATURE OF MASS CULTURE

Charles R. Wright. Mass Communication: A Sociological Perspective. Random House, 1959. 95c. An unusually concise and lucid summary of what the sociologists have learned about the structure and process of mass communication.

Edwin Emery, Philip Ault, and Warren Agee. Introduction to Mass Communication. Dodd, Mead & Co., 1960. Although designed for future mass media professionals as part of their college training, this is a handy and competent handbook on the nature of mass communication, its historical perspective, and the various media industries. Revealing to the humanist is how the universities are transforming this vocational specialty into a responsible profession.

Edmund Carpenter and H. M. McLuhan, ed. Explorations in Communications. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1960. A gathering of the provocative essays published by the University of Toronto's interdisciplinary Committee on Culture and Communication. Some thoroughly persuasive, some "far out," but always provocative. Important for the efforts of this group to use anthropological perspective to free us from the biases of a print culture.

"Mass Culture and Mass Media." Daedalus (Spring, 1960). Order from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. $1.25. Major background papers for a three-day symposium sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Tamiment Institute.

Culture for the Millions. Princeton, N. J., Van Nostrand: 1960. Transcripts of the same conference.

David Manning White and Bernard Rosenberg, ed. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957. A useful gathering of humanistic and sociological analyses of all aspects of popular culture. Good bibliography.

Richard Hoggart. The Uses of Literacy. Fairlawn, N. J.: Essential Books, 1957-Penguin paperback edition imminent. This is the moving book of a working class boy who looks back at what the mass publicists have done to his boyhood culture in Midlands England from the perspective of a Ph.D. in English literature.

Poyntz Tyler, ed. Advertising in America. H. W. Wilson. The Reference Shelf, Vol. 31, No. 5, 1959.

Martin Mayer. Madison Avenue, U.S.A. Pocket Books, 50c, 1959. A sound survey of a business crucial to the quality of mass communication, except for the final "philosophical" essays on the added value theory of advertising.

Patrick D. Hazard, "The Public Arts and the Private Sensibility," in Lewis Leary, ed. Contemporary Literary Scholarship. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1958. A summary of relevant literature up to 1958.

Another way to follow the periodical literature in this field is the annual bibliography on "Mass Culture" in the American Quarterly (American Studies Assoc., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 4).