Television was far more pervasive and radicalizing than printing had been. It was massive. When Riesman and others spoke of books,... magazines, and radio as mass media, they could not imagine the size and shape of television. There never had been a medium that could reach everybody, and reach them with images of behavior as behavior without the rationalization of words. The audience for its programs was drawn from every social class and every social element. By the mere act of watching television, a heterogeneous society could engage in a purely homogeneous activity. Television images are more rapid and transient than the printed word. They make no demand on us to remember or reflect on them. This impermanence and the time of consumption cause us to spend extended hours with the medium but significantly less time with any one image or sequence of images. Television is instantaneous and simultaneous: Everyone gets the message at the same time and, at the same time that an event is happening. There is no lag time between a reporter witnessing an event and reporting it, and no time for reflection and analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
WHEREAS no provisions have, as yet, been made by the World's Columbian Exposition Commission for securing exhibits from the colore...d women of this country, or the giving of representation to them in such Fair, and WHEREAS under the present arrangement and classification of exhibits, it would be impossible for visitors to the Exposition to know and distinguish the exhibits and handiwork of the colored women from those of the Anglo- Saxons, and because of this the honor, fame and credit for all meritorious exhibits, though made by our race, would not duly be given us ... RESOLVED that for the purpose of demonstrating the progress of the colored women since emancipation and of showing to those who are yet doubters, and there are many, that the colored women ... are making rapid strides in art, science and manufacturing, and of furnishing to all information as to ... what the race has done, is doing and might do, in every department of life, that we, the colored women of Chicago request the Columbian Commission to establish an office for a colored woman whose duty it shall be to collect exhibits from the colored women of America ... [ellipses in source]LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without ...the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.... Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters' High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimon...y to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Measured by any standard known to science--by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape,--the tension and vibration and volu...me and so-called progression of society were full a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800;Mthe force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time. No law of material movement applied to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of s...hapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have mor...e in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The automobile and the telephone are defeated as instruments of individualism by being applied to the needs of a mass society. The... automobile fulfills man's desire to move over the surface of the earth all by himself; but by becoming accessible to everybody, automobiles have paralyzed our streets. Individualism is possible only in plenty of empty space. Similarly, telephones block their own paths of individual communication when everybody is talking: the phone is too often "busy." Private enterprise cannot but strangle itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »