What is Mass Communication?

06 January 2009

“Does a fish know it’s wet?” influential cultural and media critic Marshal McLuhan would often ask. The answer, he would say, is “No”. The fish’s existence is so dominated by water that only when water is absent is the fish aware of its condition.

So it is with people and mass media. The media so fully saturate our everyday lives that we are often unconscious of their presence, not to mention their influence. Media inform us, entertain us, delight us, annoy us. They move our emotions, challenge our intellects, insult our intelligence. Media often reduce us to mere commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Media help define us; they shape our realities.

A fundamental theme of this page is that media do none of this alone. They do it with us as well as to us through mass communication, and they do it as a central – many critics and scholars say the central – cultural force in our society.