Mass society, mass media and the transformation of minority identity.

The paper asks whether mass media rather than being a homogenizing force, is in fact one that promotes differentiation, whether mass media is one for revolutionary change and whether rather than generating a crisis of identity, it aids in generating new identity. In other words, the advent of new communications techniques and patterns particularly television may have proven to have had precisely the contrary effect of that suggested by some of the classical views of the increasing massification of society and social relationships. The emergence of sundry militant minority groups in the 1960s, the black revolutionists, student and anti-war groups, neo-feminists, the poor, the Indians organized as red power with the aid of the electronic mass media implies that the social consequences of the new technologies of communication will profoundly alter the social order but not in the exact way foreseen by most of the contemporary mass society essayists. Although mass media may have a confirmative potential for majority groups, it possesses a transformative function for minority group identities. With future developments of multi-channel cable vision and other individualized media, an accentuation of the process may occur.