The increasingly homogenising and ultimately dehumanising effect of mass media is one which has a considerable influence on contemporary society and consequently, on the production of identity in the post-modern subject. Through the ubiquitous media presence in almost every aspect of modern life, society’s consciousness is unwittingly being shaped and manipulated. In the hands of a ruling elite, the media exists to turn the general public into passive consumers, to endlessly propagate consumer culture and to shape potentially divergent societal identities into a single, streamlined, generic identity which is most profitable. In the contemporary social conditions which see a privileged few holding vast amounts of power over the majority, and the utilisation of that power to manipulate the majority, the Marxist dialectic of class struggle has a new relevance. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their early collaboration The German Ideology, discuss the dominance of the ruling classes in the shaping of society: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”1 If, as Marx asserts, the subordinate classes are subject to the ideas of the ruling elite - ideas which are based entirely on creating optimal conditions for private accumulation through the distortion of individuality - the mass media would appear to play a pivotal role in this subjugation. Societal identity is defined by the prevailing ideas of the age and the media is used as an exceptionally powerful tool by the elite to disseminate their ideas and engender specific appetites for consumption within society. An ideology which exists to reproduce social domination by legitimising the premiership of the ruling classes and thus continually replicate the existing hierarchies of power and control is one which poses a great threat to individualism and the critical faculties of society at large.
“Through the ubiquitous media presene in almost every aspect of modern life, society’s consciousness is unwittingly being shaped and manipluted.”