That is, we think of a set of institutions and products which are commonly subsumed under the label ‘mass communication’. But what is ‘mass communication’ is an infelicitous phrase. The term mass is especially misleading. It conjures up the image of a vast audience comprising many thousands, even millions of individuals. This may be an accurate image in the case of case of some media products, such as the most media popular modern-day newspapers, films and television programmes; but it is hardly an accurate representation of the circumstance of most media products, past or present. During the early development of the periodical press, and in some sectors of the media industries today (for instance, some book and magazine publishers), the audiences were and remain relatively small and specialized. So if the term ‘mass’ is to be used, it should not be construed in narrowly quantitative terms. The important point about mass communication is not that a given number of individuals (or a specifiable proportion of the population) receives the products, but rather that the products are available in principle to a plurality of recipients.
There is another respect in which the expression mass may be misleading. It suggests that the recipients of media products constitute a vast sea of passive, undifferentiated individuals. This is an image associated with some earlier critiques of mass culture and mass society, critiques which generally assumed that the development of mass communication has had a largely negative impact on modern social life, creating a kind of bland and homogeneous culture which entertains individuals without challenging them, which provides instant gratification is based. This traditional line of cultural criticism is not without interest; it has raised some important issues which still deserve to be addressed today, albeit in a rather different fashion. But this critical perspective is also imbued with a set of assumptions which are untenable, and which can only hinder an understanding of the media and their impact in the modern world. We must abandon the assumption that the recipients of media products are passive onlookers whose senses have been permanently dulled by the continuous reception of similar messages. We must also abandon the assumption that the process of reception itself is an unproblematic, uncritical process through which products are absorbed by individuals, like a sponge adsorbing water. Assumptions of this kind have little to do with the actual character of reception activities and with the complex ways in which media products are taken up by individuals, interpreted by them and incorporated into their live.