Mass Media Research
The interest of sociologists in mass communication was stimulated by developments in technology allowing the reproduction and speedy transmission of messages. It began with the rise of the popular press, followed by the invention of film, sound broadcasting (or radio), and the audiovisual, including television and cable television. In the past decade, this interest has grown to embrace computer-influenced adaptations of these traditional mass media, the latest being the World Wide Web (www), which is part of the Internet, or the Information Superhighway.
All of us live in a world of media-constructed images that, presumably, significantly influence what we think and how we partition our attention, time, and other scarce resources. So pervasive has been the media presence that issues relating to these influences have also drawn the attention of researchers from disciplines other than sociology.
It is to Harold Lasswell (1947), an empirically oriented political scientist, that the social science community owes a succinct formula that lays out the major elements within the field of communication research: Who says what in which channel to whom and with what effects? Only some channels lend themselves to mass communication, which can be defined, in the terms of the above formula, as the transmission by professional communicators (who) of a continuous flow of a uniform content (what) by means of a complex apparatus (channel, or how) to a large, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed audience (to whom), the members of which are usually anonymous to the communicator and to each other.
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