DE-MASSIFYING THE MEDIA
city…… The result [was that] people had only a small number ofdifferent people to imitate or model themselves after,
“Their choices were even more limited by the fact that the people they could model themselves after were themselves all of limited experience with other people.” The images of the world built up by the village child, therefore, were extremely narrow in range.
The messages he or she received, moreover, were highly redundant in at least two senses: they came, usually, in the form of casual speech, which is normally filled with pauses and repetitions, and they came in the form of connected “strings” of ideas reinforced by various information givers. The child heard the same “thou shalt nots” in church and in school. Both reinforced the messages sent out by the family and the state. Consensus in the community, and strong pressures for conformity, acted on the child from birth to narrow still further the range of acceptable imagery and behavior.
The Second Wave multiplied the number of channels from which the individual drew his or her picture of reality. The child no longer received imagery from nature or people alone but from newspapers, mass magazines, radio and, later on, from television. For the most part, church, state, home, and school continued to speak hi unison, reinforcing one another. But now the mass media themselves becamea giant loudspeaker. And their power was used across regional, ethnic, tribal, and linguistic lines to standardize the images flowing in society’s mind-stream.
Certain visual images, for example, were so widely mass-distributed and were implanted in so many millions of private memories that they were transformed, in effect, into icons. The image of Lenin, jaw thrust out in triumph under a swirling red flag, thus became as iconic for millions of people as the image of Jesus on the cross. The image of Charlie Chaplin with derby and cane, or Hitler raging at Nuremberg, the image of bodies stacked like cords of wood at Buchen-wald, of Churchill making the V sign or Roosevelt wearing a black cape, of Marilyn Monroe’s skirt blown by the wind, of hundreds of media stars and thousands of different, universally recognizable commercial products—the bar of Ivory soap in the United States, the Morinaga chocolate in Japan, the bottle of Perrier in France—all became standard parts of a universal image-file.
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