Media for the Millions

ROBERT C. O'HARA. Media for the Millions: The Process of Mass Communication. Pp. xviii, 421. New York: Random House, 1961. $4.25.

It is a truism that a free society depends to a crucial degree on the quality of its communications system. Thus the efforts that have been made since World War II to include "communications" study in a liberal education must be taken seriously. The implicit rationale for such courses is sound: If the unexamined life is as worthless as the standard humanist argument says it is, then it is essential that the new institutions of mass communications be examined systematically. Only then will the democratic patron be able to use his freedom to choose wisely and well. The trouble starts when one tries to hit such an amorphous target. Not surprisingly, this area is particularly vulnerable to the sniping that goes on in the cultural cold war between the empirically inclined and the traditionally oriented.

The social scientist is likely to be more permissive to begin with, seeing that genres like soap opera and the western have psychological functions perhaps indispensable to the only partially emancipated members of a complex industrial culture. Their arguments tend to explain away the "menace of mass culture." On the other hand, the more traditional English professor would prefer to ignore the Monster, regarding his own explication of high culture as the only sufficient antidote to the puerilities of popular culture anyway.

In this reviewer's judgment, the few really useful responses to mass culture have been those which have avoided the facile polarities of academic politics by creating what amounts to a historical sociology of mass communication. Leo Lowenthal's essays on changes in popular biography and the response of eighteenth-century English intellectuals to the "newer media" of that era-newspapers, magazines, middle-class fiction-are good cases in point. So are the books of English literary critics like Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, who unabashedly use the insights of social science in guiding and in part validating the intuitive judgments of their own literary sensibilities.

Robert O'Hara's book is less successful than these because he has not been able to make so convincing an amalgam of traditional wisdom and newer knowledge. His facile jibes at "the jargon" in Charles Wright's Mass Communication: A Sociological Perspective seem to me grossly unfair to a brilliantly lucid summary of what sociology has discovered about mass communication. A careful reading of that small volume by every English professor who presumes to prescribe for the ills of our media system would do more to untangle us than any other single thing I can think of-unless it would be these same gentlemen writing books about the American predicament as good as Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and Williams' Culture and Society.

What we need more than anything else is a historical perspective that will silence the pushers of panic buttons. For media history reveals that the television crisis is simply the latest in a series of adjustments that included Socrates' suspicion of the new medium of writing-it would destroy the memory and the lecturer's total authority with one fell stroke of the stylus; the Duke of Urbino's disdain for having printed books dirty up his manuscript collection; and so on-down to the current egghead cliche about not owning a television set. Once historical perspective reveals that media change has always disrupted communication monopolies, it is then much easier to formulate melioristic alternatives that save what is essential from the past as the possibilities of the new are explored.

The basic problem with O'Hara's book, which has grown out of his five years' experience as director of mass communication studies in the Minnesota Communication Program, is that it does not pose the alternatives. On several occasions he chillingly dismisses as "academic" just those tough theoretical and historical is-sues which justify the truly liberating education. By concentrating on what is common to all mass-communication processes, he foregoes the more important area of freedom in which some mass media extend awareness and suggest fresh solutions.

A truly activist approach would analyze the possibilities of unique achievement in the more massive media, whether it be "Captain Kangaroo" for children on television; the folk music renaissance on the long-playing records; Jules Feiffer in that offbeat weekly, The Village Voice; or the new artfilm traditions. By concentrating on the stereotypes of fact and fiction in the newer media, rather than on the successful and interesting deviants within the system, he ends, in effect, by saying that the system is dull and depressing because most of us are too. I prefer the standard humanist strategy of identifying and explicating excellence in the hope that more, and eventually enough, people will get a taste for it.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 341, Unconventional Warfare (May, 1962), pp. 170-171 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science