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Walter Lippmann must be rolling in his grave.In the 1920s, Lippmann marveled as the commercial ambitions of the industrial age married the new technologies of mass media.Since the turn of the century, radio had transformed the living rooms of American homes into listening posts, where families gathered to hear distant, disembodied voices and to imagine the places they spoke from.New printing technologies had turned the pages of magazines from black-and-white blocks of text into multicolored extravaganzas of photographic delight.And perhaps most amazingly of all, the cinema drew new crowds to stare at moving pictures projected on the wall.To Lippmann, the rise of mass media required a new and critical outlook on public life.Never a fan of hoi polloi, Lippmann argued that the mass media fundamentally deceived their audiences.Media, he explained, put "pictures in our heads" (Lippmann 1922).These pictures set the terms by which audiences decided how to act in the world, but they did not necessarily represent the world as it was.On the contrary, they represented the interests of those who made the pictures in the first place.To study the power of media, he implied, was to study the power of special interests to control our view of the world.Lippmann's argument has echoed down through media theory for almost a hundred years.Until the advent of digital media technologies at least, scholars largely agreed: media-which was almost always assumed to be mass media-had power because of their ability to create and distribute representations and so to shape audience's perceptions of reality.Media technologies in turn did the work of industrial technologies.That is, they made sure that the same representations reached as many people as possible.The most powerful media were often assumed to be precisely those that could broadcast the most complex combinations of sound and picture to the widest array of audiences.Audiences might be dupes (as in the panic literatures of the 1930s and the 1950s) or they might be active makers of
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