Concept
mass society
A family of ideas holding that growth in scale dissolves community and intermediate-group ties, that elites become open to mass pressure and masses to elite mobilisation, and that the media manage this arena; not one single theory.
Mass society is a model that says a society, or part of it, is largely organised through mass relations: institutions deal with people not one by one but as an undifferentiated aggregate. According to Kornhauser this arises not because the population is large but because the scale of activities is large; national markets, national organisations, audiences and electorates push local community, ethnic and religious communities and class communities into the background.
The test is not numbers but the way ties are formed: a society made of thousands of similar villages is not a mass society as long as relations stay village-centred. The core of the theory is a two-way formula: elites are accessible to mass pressure and masses are available for mobilisation by elites, while the buffer between them, the intermediate groups, has weakened. The mass media run this arena because they are the one means of showing the same thing to the whole population at once.
The idea has two strands: the aristocratic (right-wing) strand, which fears the rising masses, and the democratic and left strands, which fear atomised people being mobilised from above. Postwar research put pressure on the claim of atomisation, and the term fell out of favour in sociology because of its vagueness and its value-laden character; still, there are writers who keep asking about relationships in large-scale societies.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) In a country where trade unions, associations and neighbourhood organisations have collapsed, politicians addressing the public directly from the screen would be an instance of the theory’s picture of accessible elites and available masses.