The gaps of which communication is made1

Abstract

Mass communication, as typically defined, is an oxymoron: communication without interaction. The distance between dissemination and reception has usually been understood as making mass communication inferior to face‐to‐face interaction and as resulting from twentieth‐century technology. Instead, I argue that the gap between transmission and reception is fundamental to almost all forms of communication, such that mass communication may be the more basic form. The effort to theorize communication and mass communication has been a topic of discussion from the beginnings of western philosophy (Plato), from the beginnings of the twentieth century's most influential media system (U. S. broadcasting), and in the philosophy of interpretation (Ricoeur's hermeneutics). Some sort of conceptual contrast between open dissemination (mass) and individualized interaction (interpersonal) is inevitable, I conclude, not because scholars need to specialize but because human beings are finite. The human condition shapes the contrast.

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