“Mass society and mass media theory, which evolved from the 1920s, led to the concepts of mass audiences and mass markets which have been pre-eminent paradigms in media research and the public sphere throughout much of the twentieth century.
Macnamara, J. Beyond voice: audience-making and the work and architecture of listening as new media literacies. In ‘Continuum. 2013. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2013.736950
However, as far back as 1927, John Dewey argued that thinking of people as a mass or aggregate is not useful in understanding how communication or society works. In 1958, noted British sociologist Raymond Williams wrote in Culture and Society: ‘There are in fact no masses; only ways of seeing people as masses’. Even when people are forced to become part of a large ‘viewing public’, they remain agentic individuals each interpreting and sometimes resisting content and messages.”