Whether one accepts one version or the other, it’s clear that the activities of these seminal scholars, especially in contexts sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, were a major part of what we now know as the “effects paradigm.” “Communication” was a term that was selected somewhat consciously to convey a more scientific impression than the word “propaganda,” and “mass communication” entered the lexicon as a coinage that would characterize at least the next five decades of media research. It was an alternative to studying propaganda, which seemed to be an ideologically polluted endeavor.
With the invention of mass communication, Lasswell also put on the table a simple list of research questions that could focus the minds of those studying the topic in the war years: “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effects?” (Bryson et al., 1940; Lasswell, 1948, p. 37). The formulation proved to be an enormously appealing way to simplify the complicated task at hand of reducing mass communication research to component questions that would be susceptible to study. Two parts of the question (which channel, with what effects) gave birth to, or at least crystallized, what most researchers in communication generally came to understand their job to be: figure out how media have effects.
Usage of the terms mass communication and media effects grew from there (see Figure 1). Important early books that institutionalized it as a name for a field include Lazarsfeld’s The people’s choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet 1940); Katz and Lazarsfeld’s Personal influence (“a new focus for the study of mass media effects”, 1955, p. 13; “the over-riding interest of mass media research is in the study of the effectiveness of mass media attempts to influence,” pp. 18–19); Berlo’s The process of communication (1960); and finally Klapper’s The effects of mass communication (1960). Further influential texts and handbooks have emerged as well. What is ironic is that most of the textbooks that have enshrined media effects as a field of study have taken on what came to be known as the “limited effects” perspective. They argued that earlier views of mass communication had over-estimated media power, perhaps out of fear. They suggest: when media effects questions were submitted to empirical tests, the fears were not substantiated. Thus, we have the oddity of a field – media effects – that often negates or questions whether such effects exist at all. It became an issue that would animate, and still animates, inquiry.
Figure 1 Appearance of the terms “mass communication” and “media effects” in books in English (as a % of total)
Source: Google Ngrams, https://books.google.com/ngrams
Some commentators have equated the overall field of communication with the quantitative study of media effects, though this is an obvious exaggeration. The growth in the number of studies focusing on media effects (and calling themselves that) was astronomical from the 1940s onward. Particularly as institutes were set up within universities to study communication, and then departments as well, media effects work acquired the qualities of being focused on determining measurable changes in attitude or behavior from exposure to media messages.
It’s impossible to pin down the absolute genesis of the idea of media effects, as there are plenty of references in the literature that use the terms “effects” before World War II, and also, as we have seen, some of the earliest studies attempted to assess effects from media. But the twin-birth of ideas about mass communication and media effects in the 1940s seems as good a place as any to set mile marker zero for the long highway of studies that were to come.
Another way
The foregoing material describes only one story about how people have studied media effects. While it is easy to over-generalize, much of the work described above looks at media from a perspective that can be termed “informational.” That is, media messages are usually seen as pieces or streams of information that can be absorbed by recipients. The questions of Lasswell lend themselves quite easily to this outlook; the methods of social science like to be able to boil things down to single quantifiable variables. Across hundreds and even thousands of studies, the goal of this kind of media effects research (even today) is to determine to what degree these absorptions are effective. Media effects has been, in many ways, a vast elaboration of the basic ideas of persuasion research. We will be examining this perspective in greater detail in later chapters.
Distinguished from this, there are approaches that look at media effects from an ideological perspective. These “critical” approaches have identified media institutions as the arm of an economic, political, and cultural order that describes and enforces norms in a world where power means everything. In these types of studies, effects are seen as emerging from the explicit or implicit encoding of ideological perspectives, outlooks, assumptions, and worldviews into messages, which then become the dominant way of looking at the world for media audiences. These approaches from media studies or cultural studies often use the term “effects” pejoratively. There has been a consistent tendency to denigrate effects research as an overly simplistic quantification that ultimately can’t prove its own point. However, even while abjuring the term effects, these scholars and thinkers have consistently put forward views of the media as quite powerful. Although they did not seek to make empirical demonstrations of their hypotheses through social science methods, their views were quite influential, either as a tocsin or call to arms about the need to understand media’s critical role, or as a counterpoint or whipping boy to the ideas of the informational theorists.
Critical studies
Ideological strains of thinking about media begin with reactions to Marx. To simplify greatly, Marxism – which itself adopted the mantle of science – had predicted that proletarian revolutions would come as workers would realize the injustice of the inequality of their situation in relation to capital. Although some of these revolutions did occur, first and most notably in Russia, they were not as widespread as would have been necessary to confirm the hypotheses of Marxism. From this came the work of follow-on theorists, many on the European left, who sought ways to extend the basic ideas of Marxism in light of the actual progression of history. Oftentimes this involved a view of the media as a sort of narcotic that distracts people from true class consciousness. If people were not reacting in ways that Marxist social theory predicted, it might have been because media served as a cultural “opiate” (Marx had also identified religion as such an opiate, and modern mass media was beginning to take on some of the trappings of religion as well).
Early proponents of this view were from the so-called Frankfurt School, who first brought European ideas about media and culture into contact with American perspectives in the World War II period. Their work was, and has continued to be, highly influential. The role of media in these analyses is as a corrupting force that dilutes genuine cultural expression and makes it into something more suitable for a culture “industry.” The powers (the “effects”) of this industry are assumed from the start, and are quite massive when compared to the effects that were studied by the social scientists. Major early figures in the Frankfurt School movement were Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who argued:
Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial