The individual in a mass culture

Title

Creator

Gerbner, George

Language

English

Source

Panorama XII (8) August 1960

Subject

Popular culture -- United States

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

Lonely in a crowd The Individual in a MASS CULTURE George Gerbner T takes 17,000 different job classifications to produce an ordinary can of peas. Thou sands more are needed to mar ket the millions of cans that must be sold to pay the produ cers and to make a profit. A small army of specialized talent mus: convince us, therefore that one brand of ordinary peas is like no other brand of ordinary peas. Finally, we need a de tachment of the artists, perfor mers, and technicians to create the popular cultural atmos phere in which the vibrant image of the brand the corpo rate profile of its provider may be etched in the public mind. All this is genuine aspect of mass culture. Mass culture today has ab sorbed and utilized previously existing forms and functions of high folk class cultures, devel oped new form of its own, and transformed the whole into a historically new phenomenon. The facts of this transformation are so obvious that we often take them for granted. Parents used to wonder how they spent their time before they had chil dren. Today they are equally apt to ask, “What did we do be fore television?” 22 Panorama As a nation we now devote more time to the consumption of mass-produced communica tions than to paid work, or play, or anything except sleep (and the “late show” is cutting into that too). Television alone, only ten years old as a mass medium now demands one-fifth of the average person’s waking life. Comic books, twenty years old, can sell one billion copies a a year at the cost of $100 mil lion — four times the budget of all public libraries, and more than the cost of the entire book supply for both primary and secondary schools. Movies de veloped within a lifetime, reach 50 million people who still go to theatres each week. The same number stay home and watch movies on TV each night —a total of 50 million a week But such facts and figures illuminate only one facet of the transformation. They do not reveal anything about changes in the structure, context, and orientation of popular culture. H omo sapiens became a re cognizable human being through collaboration, communi. 1y, and communication^, Of these, communication is the most uniquely human element in its symbolic representation and re-creation of the human condition. This symbolic repre sentation and re-creation — whatever we call it news, infor mation, or entertainment — is the heart of popular culture. This is the shared communica tive context of messages and images through which society reveals to each of its members the varieties limitations, and potentials of the human condi tion. The basic social function of popular culture is, therefore, to make available to all members of the species the broadest range of meanings of their own humanity that society makes possible, and, in turn, to help them build such societies as new conceptions of the human po tential may require. Popular culture can fulfill such functions to the extend that it makes available repre sentations and points of view that enable men to judge a real world, and to change reality in the light of reason, necessity, and human values. To that extent, popular cul ture also forms the basis for self-government. Men’s experiments with selfgovernment are predicated on a historically new conception of popular culture. This new con ception assumes that men have such consciousness of existence as they themselves provide for in communications; that reason confronts realities on terms culmakes available; that societies can be self-directing only to the extent, and in ways, that their popular cultures permit them to be so. August 1960 23 Much has happened since some of these assumptions found expression in the First Amendment. Popular culture has come to be mass-produced and harnessed to the service of a marketing system. The founding fathers made life, liberty, and property sub ject to law but tried to protect freedom of speech and press from the main threat they knew —government. They did not foresee the revolutionary cul tural development of our time: the transformation of public communication into mass-pro duced commodities protected from the laws of the republic but subjected to the laws of pro perty and of markets. Today the words of Andrew Fletcher, uttered in 1704, rever berate in the halls of the Acade my (and, at times, of Con gress): “I believe if man were permitted to write all the bal lads, he need not care who should make the laws of the na tion.” For ours is a revolution in the making of all the ballads. The “ballads” of an age are those vivid dramatic accounts and images which compel atten tion for their own sake and which, in so doing, provide com mon assumptions about man, life, and the world. They are the means through which socie ty communicates to its mem bers. Today these means are big, few, and costly. They are own ed, controlled, and supported by industrial enterprises of mass communication. These en terprises, and the industries that support them, bear central res ponsibility for decisions affect ing popular culture. It falls to them to safeguard the freedom to reflect on the requirements and dreams of a real world. But there are neither Constitutional guarantees nor alternative forms of support to protect the mass media in carrying out these responsibilities and in safeguarding these freedoms. The strategy of private-enter prise mass production is geared to careful assessment, cultiva tion, and exploitation of market able desires. A detachment of intelligence specialists probes public fancy; . reconnaissance brings in the sales charts, costper-thousand figures, consump tionstatistics; corporate head quarters issues a series of battle orders; an army of popularity engineers prepares compelling messages designed to make the public want what it will get. Then vivid images of life roll out of the “dream factories”, produced to exacting specifica tions to sell the public what it wants. These are the images and messages through which millions see and judge and live and dream in the broader hu man context. And the condi tions of sale are implicit in the in the content and quality of the the dream. What are these im24 Panorama lications? How do these condi tions of sale affect the indivi dual’s image of himself? How is that image changing? Individual means indivisible, a single separate person. Indivi duality is the sum total of char acteristics that set one indivi dual apart from all others. What leads to differentiation and uniqueness of individual existence? One factor is the range of response required by the environment. Life probably began in the depth of the oceans where food can float to the sim plest organism with little effort or sensation on its part. A higher form of differentiation is required when the organism can float against the current, as well as with it, in search of food. But the highest forms of life we get tremendously more complicated pattern because of the operation of another factor: social life. Specialization in the perform ance of socially necessary tasks leads to further differentiation and uniqueness. When 17,000 different job classifications go into caning of peas we have an intricate social network both re lating and differentiating ways of making a living, which is the material basis of individualized existence. But existence by itself is not consciousness of existence. Be tween human existence and our consciousness of existence stand the symbolic representation and imaginative re-creaiton of exist ence that we call culture. Cul ture is itself a historical process and product. It reflects the gen eral productive structure of so ciety, the role and position of communications institutions, the dominant points of view their role and position may impart to these institutions, and certain overriding myths, themes, and images. ^DUCATORS especially wond er about the consequences inherent in the commercial com pulsion to present life in salable packages. They observe that in a market geared to immediate self-gratification, other rewards and appeals cannot successfully compete. They are concerned about subjecting young people to dramatically heightened im pact of the adult environment as the target audience of con sumers presumably wishes to see it. There is fear of distor tion and moral confusion in the image of the human condition that might emerge. And there is suspicion that the appeal to juvenile fantasy, role experi mentation, curiosity, and even and even anxiety and revolt, may be based more on the pri vate necessity of developing ha bits of consumer acceptance than on public requirements of developing critical judgment and of defining essentials of a useful life in society. Not least among the parado xes confronting “people of abun August 1960 25 dance” having “comfort and fun” in the “afluent society” is the shadow of what rather than surfeit in our midst, and around the world. The soothing voice ti tillates lethargic consumers while muted government re ports speak of as many as one out of every five American fa milies living in stubborn poc kets of permanent poverty. And before the message is over, somewhere within half a day’s jet-range of the voice a spiderbellied child whimpers and lies still forever. The image of the human condition reflected in the selective mirror of mass cul ture defies full moral compre hension; it can be grasped only in terms of previleges of the market place, of purely private rewards of the moment, danger ously divorced from the world of crying needs with which the present market structure can not effectively connect. The charge of the critics is, in brief, that for all its attrac tions and private satisfacitons, our mass culture does not link the individual to that real world of existence in which he can be come an autonomous person, in which he can base his direction on an awareness of the existing structure of his relations to the others, in which he can find re presentations and points of view necessary to judge and change reality in the light of human values. The complexity of the struc ture of our relationships to otner places on popular culture in c.easing demands to illustrate, illuminate, explain, and drama tize the meaning of being a man in a collective society. Whether we call it information, enter tainment or even escape, I think it is basically this quest which explains the alacrity with which we embrace every basic innovation in popular cul ture. But the “privatized” indi vidual finds his hidden thirsts increased rather than quenched. Over previledged as a consu mer and undernourished as a citizen, the purely private indivi dual is a perpetual Walter Mitty. His daydreams of identity present flight from insight into the broader context of his exist ence. From his ranks come ad dicts of schizophrenic images of Superman. Mass-produced sa dism and irrational violence are his staple diet. These afforded private gratifaction in their cheapest, and therefore most profitable, form; they can thrill him while he “tells of the world” without having to enter into any consequential relations with it. The purely private individual cannot think in Des cartes’ sense of critical reflec tion; he can only salivate to clues that evoke his “internal stirring”; he can “resonate” but not reason. There, by grace of mass culture, goes a challenge for us all. 26 Panorama

pages

22-26

Media