Fragmented modern life makes mass media the sole source of an imagined social whole.

Evidence

As social groups and classes live, if not in their productive then in their “social” relations, increasingly fragmented and sectionally differentiated lives, the mass media are more and more responsible (a) for providing the basis on which groups and classes construct an “image” of the lives, meanings, practices, and values of other groups and classes; (b) for providing the images, representations, and ideas around which the social totality, composed of all these separate and fragmented pieces, can be coherently grasped as a “whole .” This is the first of the great cultural functions of the modern media: the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge , of social imagery, through which we perceive the “worlds,” the “lived realities” of others, and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible “world-of-the-whole,” some “lived totality.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 916

Categorization

• XREF: This strikingly prefigures Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (1983) — Hall is making the same argument about print media and imagined totality years earlier. — connects to: Mass media can reset whole societies’ expectations of a normal lifestyle nationwide. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 161
• DEEPTHINKING: Core statement of the media’s ideological function: providing social knowledge by which fragmented individuals grasp a coherent totality — the load-bearing insight of Hall’s media theory.