Classic books on communication

Lippmann is one of the most influential scholars in the history of communication, and enjoys a high reputation in propaganda analysis and public opinion research. The most famous political columnist in the world created an early idea called agenda setting in his book Public Opinion (1922). This book is regarded as a basic work in the field of communication.

As a classic of communication, this book gives a panoramic description of public opinion for the first time, so that readers can appreciate the internal and external relations of public opinion in detail. Since the publication of 1922, this book has been translated into dozens of languages in the past decades and still maintains an authoritative position in this field.

The enduring mystery of Lipman's Theory of Public Opinion lies in that it effectively sorts out a series of unavoidable problems in public opinion research, such as where public opinion comes from and how to form it. What kind of results can it cause? Who is the public and what kind of public? What does public opinion mean? Is it only spread among the masses or is it formed by the masses themselves? Yes or when will it become an independent force?

In modern society, public opinion is mainly regarded as a political phenomenon. It can be said that there have always been only two sources, namely, the open system of public opinion generation and circulation and the closed system of public opinion manufacturing and indoctrination. Although both of them will produce a public opinion process with similar complexity, the results are not the same. Lippmann's "Public Opinion" has made incisive and profound discussions on prejudice, interests, the formation of public will, democratic image and other issues, completed the first comprehensive combing of the phenomenon of public opinion communication in the history of journalism, and laid the foundation for future generations' research. Lippmann noticed the great influence of mass communication on society a long time ago. Therefore, in his works such as Public Opinion and Freedom and News, he not only deeply analyzed the essence of news and its selection process, but also put forward two important concepts. One is "pseudo-environment"; The other is "stereotype". Lippmann believes that modern society is becoming more and more huge and complex. Due to the limited scope, energy and attention of practical activities, people can't keep in touch with the whole external environment and many things related to it. For things beyond one's own personal perception, people can only understand cognition through various news supply agencies. In this way, people's behavior is no longer a response to the objective environment and its changes, but a response to some kind of "mimetic environment" prompted by news organizations.

The so-called "mimicry environment" is not a "mirror image" reproduction of the real environment, but an environment that the media reminds people after selecting, processing and reorganizing symbolic events or information. However, because this kind of processing, selection and structuring activities are carried out in places that ordinary people can't see (inside the media), people usually don't realize this, but often regard the "mimetic environment" as the objective environment itself.

And "stereotype" refers to people's fixed and simplified thoughts and impressions about a particular thing, which are usually accompanied by value evaluation and feelings of likes and dislikes. Stereotype can provide a simple reference standard for people to understand things, but it also hinders the acceptance of new things. Individuals have their own stereotypes, and a society also has stereotypes widely accepted by its members, so it also plays a controlling role in society. Lippmann particularly emphasized the power of mass communication, believing that mass communication is not only the main creator of "mimicry environment", but also has a strong influence on the formation, maintenance and change of a social stereotype.

In addition, the research on agenda setting originated from Lippmann's public opinion. Although the term agenda setting is not used in the book, he expresses a basic view that the media creates symbolic imagination in our minds, which may be completely different from the "external" world we experience. He proved that mass media is the main link between events in the real world and our imagination of the event in our minds. The agenda-setting process describes how public opinion plays a role in democracy. Forty years later, Cohen continued to devote himself to the development of agenda setting. He pointed out that the media is not very successful in telling people what to think, but it is extremely effective in telling people what to think. Of course, the agenda was not named until mccombs and Xiao's articles were published in Public Opinion Quarterly of 1972. Lippmann, as one of the earliest scholars who discussed the macro-effects of mass communication, made great contributions to the emergence and development of this theory. His classic treatise "Public Opinion" is also enduring because of his incisive exposition of the above communication problems.

2. Parker's immigration newspaper and its control

The Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago is the first sociology department in the United States, and the Chicago School is the most influential school in the field of social sciences in the United States in the 20th century. Among the Chicago School, robert parker, who has the greatest influence on communication, is called "the scholar who initiated the study of mass communication".

Parker did not write many books in his life. People say that he would rather instruct others to write 10 books than spend time writing one himself. Apart from his doctoral thesis, Immigration Newspapers and Their Control published in 1922 is his only work. He made a series of influential reports and published a book introducing his students. However, his most influential book is Immigration Newspaper and Its Control, which is by far the most important textbook and reading material about early American communication.

Immigration Newspapers and Their Control is divided into four parts and eighteen chapters. The first part, "The Survival Soil of Immigrant Newspapers", is divided into four chapters to introduce the reasons for the existence of foreign newspapers, the European background of immigrant newspapers, the integration of immigrant newspapers and its enlightenment. The second part is "the situation of foreign newspapers", which is divided into five chapters to analyze advertisements, the development of local newspapers, metropolis daily, metropolis daily, war and class struggle. The third part is "The History of Immigrant Newspapers", which is divided into five chapters to introduce newspapers founded by early immigrants, newspapers founded by late immigrants, immigrants' reflection on their own immigration situation, the survival competition of newspapers and the results of survival of the fittest. The fourth part is "newspaper control", which is divided into four chapters to discuss the control lever, Hamelin's manipulation control, opponent propaganda and government intervention, and alliance control.

The publication of immigration newspapers and their control is due to a country's concern that immigrants in the United States may be unfaithful. Are thousands of German-Americans loyal to America or K. William? Will they spread propaganda or sabotage? Parker directed the research of immigrant foreign language newspapers and periodicals. He found that Yiddish, Polish, German and other newspapers mainly helped new immigrants understand how to survive in North America. Few newspapers encourage loyalty to the original motherland. American foreign language newspapers and periodicals have gradually formed their own roles by helping immigrant readers integrate into American culture. In the United States, Parker is the first person to study the relationship between ethnic minorities and the media. 19 At the end of the 20th century, a large number of new immigrants came to the United States. How to assimilate these new immigrants was a common concern of mainstream American society at that time. At the same time, American society also excludes new immigrants. Parker went deep into ethnic minority communities. After investigating dozens of foreign newspapers and periodicals, he published the monograph "Immigration Newspapers and Their Control" in 1922, opposing the suppression or control of these newspapers and periodicals. He emphasized that their role helps to maintain ethnic culture, let readers contact metropolis life through the language of their hometown, and let immigrants smoothly integrate into American society. Parker pays attention to empirical analysis and takes solving social problems as his main research direction. He investigated the slums of Chicago and the serious crime problem at that time. Parker's research contents and methods had a great influence on later scholars who studied media from the perspective of sociology in Europe, America and Japan.

In "Immigration Newspapers and Their Control", Parker mentioned the topic that communication has been studying so far: How does media content affect public opinions? How is the mass media influenced by public opinion? Can mass media bring about social change? What is the relationship between interpersonal communication and mass communication? Its definition of communication is similar to Shannon's later information theory.

3. lazarsfeld people's choice

Paul F Lazarsfeld has an important ideological influence on the formation of modern communication research, and is the pioneer of communication effect research. From 1930, the first research on the communication effect of broadcast audience in Vienna, to 1937, the "broadcast research project" in the United States and 1940, the research on the presidential election in the United States, he made causal inferences that affected personal behavior through the analytical use of sampling surveys. The People's Choice written by lazarsfeld and his assistant is called "one of the most complicated surveys in the history of social science", and it is also a classic work on the study of communication effect.

"People's Choice" takes the American presidential election of 1940 as an analysis case, trying to explain how voters make their voting choices under the influence of mass media and interpersonal relationships.

The inducement that prompted lazarsfeld and others to study public behavior in the presidential election was World War II. The war machine directly promoted the development of many humanities and social sciences in the United States, including communication: sociologists were ordered to study the morale of soldiers in order to make the mental outlook of the whole army more conducive to combat; Social psychologists were ordered to study the effectiveness of political propaganda in order to make government instructions more acceptable to the public; Anthropologists who are well versed in the cultures of other countries in the world are responsible for providing suggestions to the government to reduce the friction caused by the US government in dealing with countries such as Japan and South Korea. The success of these scholars in their respective fields has brought high reputation and more and more extensive research fields to humanities and social sciences. Various emerging research fields based on social needs also urge humanities and social sciences to get rid of pure speculative research methods and replace them with empirical research methods, because each research result is expected to explain urgent social problems or serve as the basis for the government to formulate policies. The People's Choice and the Spread of Positivism were born in this academic atmosphere.

The contribution of Man's Choice to the academic thought of communication is mainly reflected in two aspects. One is the limited effect theory of mass communication, and the other is the formation of the views of "secondary communication" and "opinion leader"

Early propaganda theorists supported powerful mass media, but later communication scholars found no evidence of such powerful influence when studying the changes of media in election behavior, consumption decision-making and other types of behavior. The main scholar who began to doubt the powerful theory of mass media effect was lazarsfeld, and it was his research on Yili County that aroused his doubts.

Lazarsfeld and others hope to prove that the mass media has a direct and powerful role in shaping people's intentions about how to act in the presidential election. He assumes that the voting decision in the presidential election will be made during the campaign and will be influenced by the news and special reports of the mass media on election issues and candidates. But the research results reveal the opposite fact: many voters in Yili county made up their minds before the election campaign began. Only 54 of the 600 respondents switched from one candidate to another, and only some of these changers did so directly because of the influence of mass media. The media can only inform and convince some key individuals, that is, those who are later called "opinion leaders", and they turn to expand this effect through interpersonal communication with followers, that is, in the two-level communication and circulation mode.

In addition, introducing face-to-face interviews, group experiments and quantitative analysis into communication is also a great contribution of lazarsfeld to the methodology system of communication. Reading People's Choice can not only have a clear understanding of the early development of communication, but also learn many effective research methods from it.