9 - Impersonal Influence and the Mass Society Tradition

Summary

The term “mass society” has fallen out of usage. Nonetheless, the basic tenets of mass society theory are alive and well as we approach the twenty-first century. For example, the recent work of Robert Putnam (1995) argues that television has caused both a decline in civic involvement and a decrease in the extent to which people trust one another. Although evidence of these claims remains ambiguous to date, both arguments are clearly within the mass society tradition; mass media are conceptualized as displacing close-knit interpersonal networks and thus producing an alienated public. Likewise, concerns surrounding “stunted public discourse” and the need to revitalize public deliberation (e.g., Fishkin 1991, 1995) testify to the perseverance of these same themes in contemporary political theory. Recent books by Lasch (1995) and Elshtain (1995) also posit that conversation is a thing of the past, and that “the death of public discourse” is imminent. Democracy is said to have a future only if “citizens come back out of their bunkers and start talk-ing” (Gray 1995: 1). Political observers readily view the past as an era in which the public actively informed itself and talked endlessly about political topics on a day-to-day basis (e.g. Bloom 1987). Likewise, the burgeoning collection of studies of social capital call for reinvigorating face-to-face associations and promoting denser interpersonal networks of mutual trust as the key to democratic success.