ABSTRACT
Advertising men, businessmen, speak continually of “media” or “the media” or “the mass media”—one of their trade journals is named, simply, Media. Mass culture either corrupts or isolates the writer. His old feeling of oneness, of speaking naturally to an audience with essentially similar standards, is gone; and writers do not any longer have much of the consolatory feeling that took its place, the feeling of writing for the happy few, the kindred spirits whose standards are those of the future. An incomparable historian of mass culture, Ernest van den Haag, has expressed this with laconic force: “The artist who, by refusing to work for the mass market, becomes marginal, cannot create what he might have created had there been no mass market. One may prefer a monologue to addressing a mass meeting. But it is still not a conversation”.
