The Mind Managers

Abstract

Abstract There is a tendency in the study of mass communications to begin to fantasize about the social powers of technology to the point where the dimensions of the social context become essentially irrelevant. With the move toward consolidation and monopoly in the broad economic context, the consolidation of culture by technological forms of consciousness manipulation presents us with the illusion of a public mind that bodes either affirmative visions of a new perceptual order (e.g., 'global village' of McLuhan) or catastrophic csonceptions of a robotization and virtually unassailable totalitarianization of the thought processes. In the case of the former, affirmative, vision of mass media, John Fekete (in "McLuhanacy: Counterrevolution in Cultural Theory," Telos no. 15, Spring, 1973) has offered an effective critique.