Satan and Savior: Mass Communication in Progressive Thought
Critical Studies in Mass Communication, (1989)DOI: 10.1080/15295038909366751
Abstract
This essay probes the contradictory philosophical reception of mass communication in the social thought of progressives such as Cooley, Dewey, Park, and Royce. Mass communication served as a focus for larger anxieties about social order, social evolution, the future of American democracy, and the integrity of the public sphere. The theoretical grapplings of these thinkers with the symbolic mediation of society, however inadequate they are, show us that the relation between society and its self-representations is a problem for modern society generally, not only for the putatively '' postmodern''; climate of the late twentieth century.