Mass Society

Mass Society
Author: Salvador Giner
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-10-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1483261182

Mass Society deals with the total outlook of human including modern politics culture, social inequality, community life, and problems. The book reviews the history of democracy and discontent. The text analyzes the mob rule, the disenchantment of progress, and the history of democracy. Modern sociological theory explains the opposition of two extreme societal models to describe the historical dynamics of mankind. The book is an attempt to explain that a mass society outlook exists and has some inner coherence and distinctive quality. The author argues that such outlook or theory is a prominent feature in the cultural imagination of man, and that modern secular society cannot be understood without such theory. The author then proceeds to identify majority with mass, and the identification of human with mass human. This identification will lead to a community vision, though the author argues the growth of a mass interpretation of society has a negative effect on the liberal theory of the individual. The text can be interesting for political science majors, sociologists, psychologists, and economists.

The Mana of Mass Society

The Mana of Mass Society
Author: William Mazzarella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022643639X

We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

Culture, Society and the Media

Culture, Society and the Media
Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2005-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134972121

This book discusses two related themes concerning the role and processes of mass communication in society. The first deals with questions regarding the power of the media: how should it be defined? how is it wielded and by whom? are previous approaches and answers to such questions adequate? The second theme revolves around the divisions between the liberal pluralist and Marxist approaches to the analysis of the nature of the media. These divisions have, in recent years, been fundamental to the debate concerning the understanding of the role of mass communication, and the examination of them in this book will challenge the reader to look more closely at a number of assumptions that have long been taken for granted.

Why Democracies Flounder and Fail

Why Democracies Flounder and Fail
Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319740709

Democracy is in crisis because voices of the people are ignored due to a politics of mass society. After demonstrating how the French Fourth Republic failed, wherein Singapore’s totalitarianism is a dangerous model, Washington is enmeshed in gridlock, and there is a global democracy deficit, solutions are offered to revitalize democracy as the best form of government. The book demonstrates how mass society politics operates, with intermediate institutions of civil society (media, pressure groups, political parties) no longer transmitting the will of the people to government but instead are concerned with corporate interests and have developed oligarchical mindsets. Rather than micro-remedy bandaids, the author focuses on the need to transform governing philosophies from pragmatic to humanistic solutions.

The Politics of Mass Digitization

The Politics of Mass Digitization
Author: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 026203901X

A new examination of mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon that alters the politics of cultural memory. Today, all of us with internet connections can access millions of digitized cultural artifacts from the comfort of our desks. Institutions and individuals add thousands of new cultural works to the digital sphere every day, creating new central nexuses of knowledge. How does this affect us politically and culturally? In this book, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup approaches mass digitization as an emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical phenomenon, offering a new understanding of a defining concept of our time. Arguing that digitization has become a global cultural political project, Thylstrup draws on case studies of different forms of mass digitization—including Google Books, Europeana, and the shadow libraries Monoskop, lib.ru, and Ubuweb—to suggest a different approach to the study of digital cultural memory archives. She constructs a new theoretical framework for understanding mass digitization that focuses on notions of assemblage, infrastructure, and infrapolitics. Mass digitization does not consist merely of neutral technical processes, Thylstrup argues, but of distinct subpolitical processes that give rise to new kinds of archives and new ways of interacting with the artifacts they contain. With this book, she offers important and timely guidance on how mass digitization alters the politics of cultural memory to impact our relationship with the past and with one another.

Mass Politics In The People's Republic

Mass Politics In The People's Republic
Author: Alan P.L. Liu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2019-03-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429719353

Exploring the crucial link between state and society in the People's Republic of China (PRC), this book analyzes the interaction between the Chinese Communist Party and the country's major social groups. It explores how public opinion contributes to a mass political culture in China.

Civil Society and Political Theory

Civil Society and Political Theory
Author: Jean L. Cohen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 804
Release: 1994-03-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780262531214

In this first serious work on the theory of civil society to appear in many years, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato contend that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become the primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights. In this major contribution to contemporary political theory, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato argue that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become a primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights.

The Time of the Tribes

The Time of the Tribes
Author: Michel Maffesoli
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1996-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803984745

In this exciting book Michel Maffesoli argues that the conventional approaches to understanding solidarity and society are deeply flawed. He contends that mass culture has disintegrated and that today social existence is conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, organized around the catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture. The book provides a rich backcloth against which to consider the rise of `identity politics' and the `proliferation of lifestyle cultures'.

Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War

Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War
Author: David A. Forgacs
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 754
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253219485

From the 1930s to the 50s in Italy commercial cultural products were transformed by new reproductive technologies and ways of marketing and distribution, and the appetite for radio, films, music and magazines boomed. This book uses new evidence to explore possible continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War II.