Literacy and Mass Media: The Political Implications
M rUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the effects of mass media, especially television, on literacy and learning in the United States, but the momentous political implications of these effects have not been adequately explored. I will make a case here that the restricted cognitive patterns induced by media in audiences also induce predominantly conservative attitudes, not in the sense of a reasoned conservative ideology but in the sense of an uncritical conformity that reinforces the social status quo and precludes oppositional consciousness. I will not deal systematically here with the political implications of other aspects of media such as subject matter, structural features including formats, formulas, and organization of time and space, or the makeup of producing institutions and personnel, but I have argued elsewhere, in refutation of neoconservative critics who claim to find a left-wing bias pervading American media, that in spite of some liberal elements, each of these aspects too has, on balance, a conservative complexion.1 My own political leanings are socialistic, and part of the agenda of this essay-by no means a hidden part of it-is a concern that media induced illiteracy is contributing toward the kind of one dimensional society that Herbert Marcuse warned about, in which the capacity to imagine alternatives to the status quo, especially alternatives of a socialistic nature, has been systematically destroyed. I do not expect more conservative readers to share this concern or to agree with all of my arguments in its support, but I do hope to gain their assent to the ultimate thrust of my argument, which is that the low level of cognitive development to which the discourse of American mass media and politics is presently geared is woefully inadequate for the effective functioning of a democracy, and that scholars of literature and language, whatever their own political convictions might be, have a responsibility to work toward raising our public discourse to a more reasoned level of dialogue between the ideologies of the right and left. Part of this responsibility lies in reorienting our theoretical concerns, research, and curricula to include the topics that are surveyed, in a very tentative way, in this essay.