Response Week 2 - Technological Determinism and Mass Communication is Really About Class

It is easy to dismiss McLuhan as a pop-theorist whose aphoristic rhetoric is unconvincing, especially when contrasted with Raymond Williams concise prose and elegant argument about the social underpinnings of all technological advancements. McLuhan’s technological determinism is not as easily dismissed as I would like to think, however. Just today I was having a discussion with a friend about the undesirable social changes that social media technologies have brought, and now in retrospect I realize I had fallen into the same deterministic trap that McLuhan fell into. 

It is easy to get caught up in the frenetic pace of technological change and to blame technology for the problems in society, and it was a good reminder that societies privilege certain areas of technological research for a reason. To assign technology the agency to corrupt society robs us of the agency to improve society, and can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, for who are we to stand in the way of scientific progress? Sarcasm aside, I think it is important to think about who benefits from this ideology of technological determinism? Certainly the military industrial complex who, as Williams notes, funded the initial research into radio, television, and the internet.

Another thing that struck me in Williams’ book was the observation in Chapter 1 that: “‘Masses’ had been the new nineteenth-century term of contempt for what was formerly described as ‘the mob’. The physical ‘massing’ of the urban and industrial revolution underwrote this. A new radical class-consciousness adopted the term to express the material of new social formations: ‘mass organizations’. The ‘mass meeting’ was an observable physical effect. So pervasive was this description that in the twentieth century multiple serial production was called, falsely but significantly, ‘mass production’: mass now meant large numbers (but within certain assumed social relationships) rather than any physical or social aggregate” (16). I think it is interesting to conceive of Television specifically, and mass communication broadly, not only as a principle site of class conflict, but as something which defines “the masses,” from the point of view of societies elites. It is only “mass communication” to those who control the means of content production and broadcast  facilities. From the point of view of the masses, it is more aptly described a “mass reception.” Williams goes on to demonstrate that even the semi-public broadcasters operate in close proximity to the State and while not overtly controlled, the decision makers are appointed by the State, chosen from a pool of State functionaries. I am reminded of Chomsky’s propaganda model from Manufacturing Consent, which argues that while individuals may genuinely believe themselves to be operating independently and objectively, they were selected to be in their position because their world view aligns with the interests of the corporation and the State.

I am really excited to be diving into the political economy of Television from the very beginning, and I hope to continue to think about these things as the semester progresses.