| Popis: |
This chapter focuses on the three influential scholarly and critical discourses on “the masses” during the postwar period: mass society theory, mass culture theory, and mass communication theory. It argues that while these three discourses had different backgrounds, they shared a common base insofar as they all inherited concerns about “the masses” from the prewar period and were defined by a search for the possibility of a “democratic subjectivity” (minshu) that could resist systemic power in the postwar context. For many scholars and critics, television and nuclear power were both symbols of a newly emergent, large-scale, and systemic form of social power, which became so deeply embedded in everyday life that it became taken for granted and hence determined the thought and behavior of “the masses.” Thus, for these scholars, it was imperative to find possible methods of resistance. This situation, the chapter also elucidates, significantly differed from the US academic situation, where mass society theory, originating in Europe, attempted to expose mass society as a social form ultimately inducing and bolstering fascism, while mass communication research tended to explicitly or implicitly align itself with the aims of US governmental power within Cold War politics. |
