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This theoretical view of the means of communication, within a perspective of historical materialism, is, in our own time, overlaid or blocked by three characteristic ideological positions.

First, the means of communication, having been reduced from their status as means of social production, are seen only as ‘media’: devices for the passing of ‘information’ and ‘messages’ between persons who either generally, or in terms of some specific act of production, are abstracted from the communication process as unproblematic ‘senders’ or ‘receivers’. People are seen, that is to say, as abstract individuals, who are then either diagrammatically represented in terms of these abstract functions, or are at best broadly characterised (i) as bearers of a generalized (‘human’) sociality (communication as abstract ‘socialization’ or ‘social process’); (ii) as bearers of a specified but still abstract sociality (communications between ‘members’ of a social group, usually national or cultural, without intrinsic reference to the differential social relations within any such group); or (iii), in an extreme form related to ‘expressivist’ theories of language, as unspecified ‘individuals’ (communication as transmission, but implying reception, by abstracted individuals, each with ‘something of his own to say’). Much otherwise sophisticated work in information and communication theory rests on, and frequently conceals, this first, deeply bourgeois, ideological position.

Then, second, in a more plausible attempt to recognize some means of communication as means of production, there is the now commonplace distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘technological’ means of communication: the former characterized, and then usually neglected, as ‘ordinary, everyday language’, in ‘face-to-face’ situations; the latter grouped around developed mechanical and electronic communication devices and then generalized—with an especially noticeable ideological shift from technical means to abstracted social relationships—as ‘mass communication’. This position has dominated a large area of modern bourgeois cultural science, but it has also, under the same title of ‘mass communications’, been uncritically imported into significant areas of socialist thinking, especially in its more applied forms.

It is theoretically inadmissible for two reasons. First, because the separation of ‘mass communications’ from ‘ordinary, everyday language’ practice conceals the fact that ‘mass communication’ processes include, in most cases necessarily, forms of ‘ordinary, everyday language’ use, to be sure in variably differential modes; and include also the simulation or conventional production of generally significant communication situations. Second, because the grouping of all or most mechanical and electronic means as ‘mass communications’ conceals (under the cover of a formula drawn from capitalist practice, in which an ‘audience’ or a ‘public’, itself always socially specific and differentiated, is seen as a ‘mass market’ of opinion and consumption) the radical variations between different kinds of mechanical and electronic means. In fact, in their differences, these necessarily carry both variable relations to ‘ordinary, everyday language’ in ‘face-to-face situations’ (the most obvious example is the radical difference of usage and communicative situation as between print and television) and the variable relations between the specific communicative relationships and other forms of social relationship (the variable extent and composition of audiences; variability of the social conditions of reception—the assembled cinema audience; the home-based television audience; group reading; isolated reading).

A variant of this second ideological position, associated especially with McLuhan, recognizes the specific differences between ‘media’ but then succumbs to a localized technological determinism, in which uses and relationships are technically determined by the properties of different media, irrespective of the whole complex of social productive forces and relationships within which they are developed and used. Thus the means of communication are recognized, but abstractly, as means of production, and are indeed, ideologically, projected as the only means of production, in which what will be produced is ‘re-tribalization’, the supposed ‘global village’ of restored, ‘unfallen’ natural man. The superficial attraction of this position, beyond the essentially abstract materialism of its specification of media, rests on the characteristically rhetorical isolation of ‘mass communications’ from the complex historical development of the means of communication as intrinsic, related and determined parts of the whole historical social and material process.

There is then, third, an ideological position which has entered into some variants of Marxism, and which permits some accommodation with the bourgeois concept of ‘mass communications’. This rests on an abstract and a priori separation of means of communication from means of production. It is related, first, to the specialized use of the term ‘production’ as if its only forms were either capitalist production—that is, the production of commodities, or more general ‘market’ production, in which all that is ever produced takes the form of isolable and disposable objects. Within Marxism it is further related to, and indeed dependent on, mechanical formulations of base and superstructure, in which the inherent role of means of communication in every form of production, including the production of objects, is ignored, and communication becomes a second-order or second-stage process, entered into only after the decisive productive and social-material relationships have been established.

This received position must be quite generally corrected, so that the variable, dynamic and contradictory forms of both ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ can be seen historically, rather than subsumed, from a bourgeois habituation, as necessary universal forms and relations. But also in twentieth-century societies, it requires an especially sharp contemporary correction, since the means of communication as means of social production, and in relation to this the production of the means of communication themselves, have taken on a quite new significance, within the generally extended communicative character of modern societies and between modern societies. This can be seen, very strikingly, within the totality of modern ‘economic’ and ‘industrial’ production, where, in the transport, printing and electronic industries ‘communicative production’ has reached a qualitatively different place in its relation to—more strictly its proportion of—production in general. Moreover this outstanding development is still at a relatively early stage, and in electronics especially is certain to go very much further. Failure then to recognize this qualitative change not only postpones correction of the mechanical formulations of ‘a base’ and ‘a superstructure’, but prevents or displaces analysis of the significant relations of communicational means and processes to the crises and problems of advanced capitalist societies and—it would seem—to the different crises and problems of advanced industrial socialist societies.