NAEB Newsletter (Aug 1952)

*13- - mmcii'mmt - by Dallas W. Smythe NAEB Director of Studies University of Illinois, Urbana ON NOTICING OUR WHITE COLLARS Broadcasters belong to the "white collar" group in society* Educational broadcasters are seeking to act like social scientists. Social scientists too are white collared. It is very much in order to try to be aware of what this white collar means—in terms of both the conscious and unconscious implications that go with wearing it. For this %^% Se 3^i re $5 T1 ^C)^ y° u rea d White Collar , by C. Wright Mils (Oxford University Here is no dull collection of statistics; rather a well-written book by a Columbia University sociologist whose thinking is solidly grounded on the concepts and processes developed by our social scientists over the past 125 years. If a sample of his writ* ing will give you the flavor of the book,, try this, from the very first paragraph: "The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have had is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making. If they aspire at all it is to a middle course, at a time when no middle course is available and hence to an illusory course in an imaginary society. Internally, they areqplit fragmented; externally, they are dependent on larger forces. Even if they gained the will to act, their actions, being unorganized, would be less a movement than a tangle of unconnected contests. As a group, they do not threaten anyone; as indiv¬ iduals, they do not practice an independent way of life." The very universality of the facets of life comprehended by the author makesitectreme* ly difficult todeseribe this book in a short review. For readers of these pages., how¬ ever, it may be helpful to mention especially those facets which are related to. the professional interests of the educational broadcasters. Mills is sensitive to the role of images in social life, and to the function of the mass media of communications in creating and sustaining images. Early in his Introduc¬ tion we find him pointing out that the way of life of the -bhite collar man was newly created by urbanization, the standardization of technology and by the mass media. He has no culture to lean on but this "mass society that has shaped him and seeks to manipulate him to its alien ends... This .isolated position makes him excellent material for synthetic molding at the hands of popular culture—print, film, radio and television. As a metropolitan dweller, he is especially open to the focused onslaught of all the manufactured loyalties and distractions that are contrived and urgently pressed upon those who liVe in worlds they never made." How did the successors of the independent farmers and the small businessmen—those heroes of the early days of our country~get this way? Mills sees the transformation of property as the basic process, and by this term he refers to the centralization of property which destroyed the essential freedom and independence of the old middle c3ass. For the farmers, the opening of the west in the last century meant prosperity in pro¬ ducing agricultural products for export markets. The mechanization of farming reduced the labor requirements for agriculture, freeing labor for urban industry. The decline of the independent farmer thus dates from the second half of the 19th Century. The long agricultural depression beginning in the 1920's completed the process, grinding the farmer between falling farm income (as the result of the shrinkage of export mar¬ kets) and unchanged prices of goods and services he must buy from urban industrialists.