by Jack Z. Bratich

About Jack Z. Bratich

Jack Z. Bratich is Associate Professor and Chair of the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. His work applies autonomist social theory to social movement media, audience studies, and the cultural politics of secrecy. He edited a special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on Occupy Wall Street.

Mass

book Keywords for Media Studies

Every time we talk about a mass we invoke an amassing. Whether via ratings measurement, political fantasy, or aesthetic judgment, an assemblage presents itself. As Raymond Williams famously put it, there are “no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1997, 20). He took this nominalism one step further by claiming that we interpret masses “according to some convenient formula… it is the formula, not the mass, which it is our real business to examine” (20).