“There are in fact no masses.” Raymond Williams quote.

24 March 2007 | Media | Comments

Looking over my archives, I just ran into this quotation by Raymond Williams. It seems poignant with regard to mass media and culture, and ahead of its time in 1958.

“The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know. Yet now, in our kind of society, we see these others regularly, in their myriad variations; stand, physically, beside them. They are here, and we are here with them. And that we are with them is of course the whole point. To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people.

“There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”

–Raymond Williams, from “Culture and Society”