Discipline in Discipline in Crisis

8/12/2019 Discipline in Discipline in Crisis

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Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Discipline in Crisis? The Shifting Paradigm

of Mass Communication ResearchAnnie LangDepartment of Telecommunications and Program in Cognitive Science, Institute for Communication Research,Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

This article analyzes the Kuhnian paradigmatic status in the eld of mass communication.It is suggested that the elds rst paradigm, Media Effects, is in a state of crisis rather than a preparadigmatic state or a state of normal science. Finally, this article proposes adescription of the current paradigm-in-crisis, suggests ways in which conceptions of the fundamental nature of what we are studying may be shifting, and proposes the elements of

a new paradigm which may be emerging in the eld.

doi:10.1111/comt.12000

According to Kuhn (1996), without a paradigm, one can do science but one cannotcreate science. This is because, without a paradigm, one is merely looking around(p. 96) to see what can be seen. The observer within a paradigm, on the other hand,is looking, with difculty, for something they expect to see; generally, something thathas not yet been observed or demonstrated. In a similar vein, Charles Darwin wrote(Shermer, 2002), How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation mustbe for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

Kuhns concept of paradigms and their purpose, as laid out in the Structure of Scientic Revolutions, has had an enormous impact onhow we think about disciplines,science, and the growth of knowledge. This article makes an attempt to very closely follow Kuhns denition, with all its qualications, of paradigm, and to apply thatclose reading to the recent history of the eld of mass communication in an attemptto answer the question: What is the dominant paradigm of mass communicationresearch and is that paradigm in crisis?

Many other writers have asked the question, does the eld of communication,or the more restricted eld of mass communication, have a paradigm. Different

answers have been offered, most notably in two fairly well-known editions of the Journal of Communication (1983, 1993), which looked at the philosophical trials andtribulations of the eld. One often cited article by Potter (1993) suggested that theeld of communication not only did not have a paradigm but also was prescientic.However, I believe that most of these articles, in their analyses, did not include allthree of the basic things, which Kuhn says a paradigm provides to the scientist: (a)an understanding of the fundamental nature of the thing which he or she is studying;(b) based on that fundamental nature, scientists devise novel, particular, or specic

Corresponding author: Annie Lang; e-mail: [email protected]

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A. Lang Discipline in Crisis

ways of observing the world; and (c) as a result of the rst two, those who share theparadigm also share agreement on what are the primary questions that should beasked about the phenomenon.

Looking back, at the last 50 or so years of mass communication research, it isinteresting to ask ourselves if we have agreement on these three things. The answers tothose questions, it seems to me, will provide an answer to the question of whether ornotwehaveorhavehadaparadigm.Shouldtheanswertothatquestionprovetobeyes,it may be possible to explicate what the paradigm is. Should we succeed in successfully explicating that paradigm, we could then ask the question whether we have beensuccessful in answering our agreed-upon questions, and if not, whether our lack of success is a resultofcounterinstances in thedata orwhat Kuhn calls anomalousresults.

According to Kuhn, counterinstances are provided by data which, while notmatching theoretical expectations, or conrming theoretical predictions, are not in

themselves of sufcient novelty, or surprising enough to cause us to question ourassumptions about the fundamental nature of what we are studying. Anomalousdata, on the other hand, call into question the fundamental assumptions of theparadigm. They do this either because, given our paradigmatic assumptions, it issimply impossible that what we are seeing has occurred, or, because, despite thebest science we can produce, work within the paradigm theory is failing to solve thepuzzles proposed by our paradigm. When this occurs, we may have a great deal of disagreement in the eld over whether we are making any kind of progress towardanswering fundamental questions, and indeed, whether our fundamental questionsare all that fundamental. Signs of this sort may indicate what Kuhn calls a eld incrisis, which means that, while there is a paradigm, it is not successfully moving theenterprise of science forward, either because it is failing to match observations of theworld and/or it is failing to increase our understanding of that world.

Kuhn gives excellent examples of both types of crises. The rst he exempliesby the discovery of x-rayswhich, although not precisely disallowed, were notconceived of within the paradigm. The subsequent work to understand and controlthem led to a fundamental shift in our understanding of light. The second typeof crisis might best be illustrated by the comparison between Ptolemaic astronomy and Copernican astronomy. At the time of Copernicus, the Ptolemaic notion of astronomy had achieved an incredible complexity; indeed, the level of complexity had increased much faster than its level of explanation, which indeed might perhapshave been decreasing. Thus, the growth of knowledge was not matching the growthin complexity and precision of the science. Increasing amounts of precision and dataled, not to an improved match between the paradigm and the world, but rather to anenormous amount of adjusting that had to be done to make the data t within theconceptions that guided its gathering resulting in a paradigm in crisis.

This article suggests that the current state of mass communication research bearsa distinct resemblance to what Kuhn described as a state of crisis, rather than apreparadigmatic state or a state of normal science. Finally, this article proposes a

description of the current paradigm-in-crisis, suggest ways in which conceptions of

Communication Theory 23 (2013) 1024 2013 International Communication Association 11


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Discipline in Crisis A. Lang

the fundamental nature of what we are study may be shifting, and proposes theelements of a new paradigm which may be emerging in the eld.

In search of our paradigm

Many people have tried to nd a paradigm in communication research and havecome to many different conclusions as to whether or not one exists. I recognize upfront the audacity of trying to do what much better scholars than I have failed todo in the past. However, perhaps the advantage of a longer view of the eld willprovide more data, and thereby make the task easier. How do we go about lookingfor a paradigm? Here let me rely on Kuhn to guide the way. First, from Kuhn welearn that a paradigm must be a scientic achievement of such extreme excellence,that it attracts followers who then adopt its fundamental assumptions, methods, and

questions. Second, Kuhn suggests that we will nd the paradigm in our textbooks.He says that textbooks do not accurately reect the history of our eld, but ratherreect history as rewritten from the perspective of the new paradigm. In this rewrittenhistory, we nd both the achievements which led to the foundation of the paradigm,the assumptions of the paradigm which primarily include the fundamental nature of what we are studying, the primary questions requiring answer, and the methods weshould use to answer these agreed-upon questions.

We all know the received history of our eld and that many excellent articleshave been written telling us it is incorrect (Delia, 1987; Wartella & Reeves, 1985).The very fact that our received history does not match the history of our eld,suggests that it is a history written by the victorious. Here, I would like to take amoment to suggest that mass communication and interpersonal communication,at least over the last 50 years, do indeed represent different disciplines. A greatdeal of data supports this contention, including the fact that they are generally located in separate departments, with the interpersonal scholars often located indepartments of speech communication or rhetoric, sometimes in English, and atother times in departments called human communication. On the other hand, masscommunication departments are often located in schools of journalism, are oftenassociated with the professions, and often have a variety of professional names, inaddition to being called mass communication. In this essay, I deal with the paradigmof mass communication and discuss whether that paradigm is shifting. To providea bit of foreshadowing, I state here that I think in the new paradigm the differencebetween mass and interpersonal communication will largely disappear; whetherdisciplinary boundaries will follow that disappearance or not is uncertain.

So what are the textbooks of mass communication? There are many, but Iwould suggest that a predominance of the current generation of midcareer tosenior scholars were partially indoctrinated by Lowery and DeFleurs Milestonesof Mass Communication Research (Lowery & DeFleur, 1983, 1988, 1995). EverettRogers, in his forward to the third edition of this textbook, suggests that these

milestones, in particular the early milestones, provided the basic framework for our



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eld, and that the framework included three things: rst, a conception of mediatedcommunications as agents for change in the society (i.e., the fundamental natureof mass communication); second, a focus on effects (i.e., general agreement on thequestions to be asked); and third, social scientic, primarily survey, and methodology (i.e., acceptable methods). Let me elaborate a bit on these points.

First, Rogers argues that our eld has a basic belief in technological determinism,a conceptualization of technology as an agent for change in society, making this afundamental assumption of mass communication research. Second, from these early studies we got a focus on the effects of mass communication. If our focus is oneffects, this implies (in concert with a belief in change) a view of humans and societiesas internally stable and even resistant to change. I would argue that this impliesthat a fundamental assumption in the current paradigm of mass communicationresearch is that society and people are, by nature, stable. In other words, people

and societies have an equilibrium at which they function most efciently, externalagents of change serve to disequilibrate the human, or the society, and bring it to anew state of equilibrium and mass communication is such an agent. Finally, Rogerssuggests that, in particular, the groundbreaking studies of Lazersfeld (perhaps this isour paradigmatic achievement ) gave to the eld the methodology of social science,and in particular the methodology of survey research.

If we review the table of contents of the Milestones, we see that the titles of thechapters reect this preoccupation with change and effects even though in many cases the studies themselves do not. The Payne Fund studies, a group of investigationscarried out in the late 1920s to describe and investigate the then new medium of lm, provide an excellent example of how history has been rewritten to match thedominant paradigm.Thestudies themselves were quite varied in their methodologicaland theoretical perspectives, but in the textbook they are described simply as researchon the effects of movies on children. Chapter 3 of Milestones, focusing on theresponse to the War of the Worlds,1 is titled Radio Panics America, implying botha universal change response and a technological cause. Other effects of the mediacovered by these milestones include the ability of the media to change votes, theability of the media to change how people gratify their fundamental needs, the ability of the media to change how people get information, the ability of the media to changepeoples attitudes, the ability of the media to change what we think about, and theability of the media to make us violent.

Other textbooks clearly reect this orientation; Glenn Sparks, in his textbook Media Effects Research (Sparks, 2002) offers a very similar history of masscommunication. First, like Deeur, he discusses the milestones, suggesting thatthese are our paradigmatic achievements that gave us our fundamental beliefs,questions, and methods. He then offers us the standard received history of the eld:From these studies came the Magic Bullet Model, which was based on the notionthat mediated or mass communication messages, which are essentially externalto society and humans, have unitary and powerful effects on humans thoughts,

emotions, and behavior. He suggests that this early theory of massive effects of



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mass communication (within a paradigm of media as agents of change and humansand societies as stable), was quickly shown, by research, to be untrue. Work by Lazersfeld, Berelson, and others demonstrated that effects of media were not massive

and were not undifferentiated leading us to the second major approach to masscommunication effects, the limited effects model. Here, the idea was that somepeople were affected some of the time, by some media, in some situations. This ledto the development of theories of the midrange. These theories were designed to ask,for specic media and specic message types, whose behavior was changed in whatsituation. Lack of an ability to nd more than minimal behavioral change as a resultof mass media exposure led the eld to expand its dependent variables from behaviorto include cognitive and affective changes among the effects of mass communication.Along with this expansion of possible dependent variables came an explosion of new media, which allowed us to take this perspective and apply it to one new mediumafter another, in one new social situation after another, with one new group of people after another. The resulting profusion of novel research may have hidden,to some extent, the dearth of actual progress being made by the eld as we continuedto conceptualize media and mediated messages as essentially external to peopleand their social milieus and functioning to change those people and those milieus.Virtually all current textbooks of mass communication provide this same history of mass communication research and their chapter headings reect a focus on whattypes of content, in what type of medium, affect which people, in what situations.

This, I will argue, is the dominant paradigm of mass communication research.

Our fundamental conception of mass communication is as an agent of change,external to people and their immediate social environments. Mass media primarily function to disrupt and change both the environment and the person. Thus, ouragreed upon primary goals and questions are to demonstrate the effects of masscommunication, and, if possible explain how they come about. In general, the eldincludes a normative sense, that the effects of mass communication are bad. Andthat maintaining the stable social system and the stable human being are anticipatedbenetsof successfulmass communication research. That is, if we successfullyexplainhow mass communication changes people and societies, we will be able to makepeople media literate, so that they can resist this change.

So, how are we doing? I would argue that like other elds before us functioningunder wrong paradigms, we have made remarkably little progress in answeringour questions about how mass communication affects people and societies. We haveidentied a number of small effects, which we glorify with the name theories, and wehave demonstrated that they occur over and over and over again, in various situationsand with various groups. We have made very little progress in explaining how they occur and in developing interventions, which prevent their occurrence (suggestingthat our understanding is at best inadequate and more likely wrong). Similarly,these midrange theories continually increase in complexity without increasing in

explanatory power or adding much to generalizable knowledge.



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For example, and I do not use this theory as my example because it is differentfrom any of our other theories, but merely because it provides an excellent exampleof increased complexity with little increase in knowledge, take agenda setting. Every scholar of mass communication who ever took a theory class learned the agenda-setting theory. We all read the original article (Mccombs & Shaw, 1972), and thenwe all had the discussion of whether it was a theory or hypothesis. Generally, beingcynical, skeptical, and brilliant graduate students we all decided that it was nota theory, it was simply a hypothesis. And indeed, the initial test was a simple andelegant test of a hypothesis. A modest survey was done coupled with a modest contentanalysis. A large and predicted correlation was shown between the topics thought tobe important among the survey participants and the weight ofcoverage of those topicsin the newspaper. From this, the conclusion was drawn that the media do not tell uswhat to think,but rather that they telluswhat to think about. Inother words, while the

media may not actually be able to CHANGE our thinking, they are able to CHANGEthe topics about which we think. I am arguing here that the very existence of thistheory is the beginning ofparadigmaticcrisis inour eld. With that statement, that themedia cannot affect our thinking, we relinquished the notion that the media actually inuence thinking. Perhaps we gave away the most important effect that the mediacould possibly have. Andweaccepted a muchsmaller effect that the mediacould tell uswhat was popular, and therefore what we would talk about, as a fundamental effectofmass communication. It was a modest study; it came to a modest conclusion, whichI believe was the beginning of the end of the dominant paradigm. If you pick up arecent issue of almost any of our journals, youll nd an agenda-setting paper inside.And that paper will bear a fantastic resemblance, in terms of its conclusions, to theoriginal modest paper. But the methodology, the analysis, and the statistics will bearnoresemblanceatall to thatrst-rankordercorrelation. Insteadwewill see all kinds of models, all kinds of differentways of coding the agendas, all sorts of different agendas,political agendas, social agendas, etc. but in the end, we will be left with the samecorrelation between weight of mediacoverage and topics people think are interesting,with no more understanding of how that happens, then we had 40 years ago.

The same is true for almost every area of mass communication effects. I believe,and Im certain that many of my readers will disagree, that almost the only thingwe have learned after 60 years of mass communication effects research is that theweight of exposure to almost any specic medium or content inuences any givenbehavior, on average, very slightly. Our eld abounds with meta-analyses, most of which conclude that there are very small and weak effects of mass communication(say 3% of the variance in the studied behavior). This result is, of course, quitecomforting for society because it means that we can ignore mass communication asa serious agent of social and behavioral change. It is, however, quite discomfortingfor scholars in the eld as it suggests they should get into another line of work.

The other possibility, and the one that I prefer, is that we are simply missing theboat. I believe that the very strong movement in mass communications away from

social science methodology and away from the study of effects, which began in the late



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1970s, and continues to this day, that is the move to critical and cultural approachesto communication, is a direct response to the failure of the dominant paradigm.It is the major sign of crisis in our eld and the most developed. Those who takethis approach to media start from a completely different fundamental understandingof communication, and a fundamentally different set of questions. These scholarswould no more ask if mass communication has effects than they would walk in frontof a speeding train. They know that it does. Why? Because they look at the world andthey see the world changing as a result of mass communication. However, they donot think that mass communication is external to the world. They do not think thatcultures are fundamentally stable. They do not think that humans are fundamentally stable. Rather, they think that communication is a fundamental and natural thingthat humans do. Communications within small groups and small social situationsreect the thoughts and ideas of the people within those groups, and serve to help

the group function. Interpersonal communication is a natural thing that humans do,they do it to achieve individual and social ends,and communications rise from withina group of people. Mass communication, on the other hand, is different. In thisapproach, mass communication is seen as arising not only from individuals but alsofrom the institutions of power in the society. In other words, mass communication(at least until the last decade) was controlled by large companies; large companiesare controlled by rich and inuential members of society; and therefore, the largecompanies controlled the expression, the thought, and the opinions expressed overmass media. Therefore, mass-mediated messages could be read as expressions of power in society, and, as attempts to change society, or mold society, into somethingwhich would help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Excellent discussions of these critiques of effects research can be read in Livingstone (1996) and Miller (2009).

Note that this is fundamentally different in every way from the dominantparadigm. First, it does not assume that mass media are external to society (althoughthey are external to individuals), it simply assumes that mass media are a tool of asmall but powerful group in society. It does not assume that mass communicationcannot change how people think or what they think about, or their behavior.Rather, it assumes that it can and does. Indeed, it is not necessary to prove thatit does, rather this approach nds mass media effects to be self-evident. It rejectsthe social scientic approach, perhaps, primarily because it has completely failedto see the enormous power of mass communication by focusing on small, short-term, measurable behavioral effects and its rejection of the entire notion that masscommunication can inuence how we think. The dominant method is one of lookingat the texts of mass communication in an attempt to demonstrate the goals of thosein power and the methods they are using to keep the rest of us in line. Its tone iscritical, and its methods are humanistic, not scientic. Indeed, they are humanistic,because communication is seen as fundamentally human, and something humans donaturally in order to mold their environment.

The result of this movement away from the dominant paradigm has been the

growth of a new discipline, something we might call communication and culture. As



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a discipline, it now bears no resemblance to the more professionally and scientically oriented discipline of mass communication. It is probably fair to say not only thatit is a different discipline, but also that it has a different paradigm, and that it is

fundamentally, at this time, nonscientic. So let us return to our social scientic view of mass communication.It is the 1980s, the dominant paradigm is one of effects, and the signs of crisis are

showing. We dont think media have much effect on how we think. We have lost afair number of scholars to a new discipline. We have a large body of research that tellsus that mass communication has weak or no effects, despite the growing evidence of our eyes that mass communication has enormous effects on every aspect of social andhuman behavior. The next sign of crisis, I will argue, was a direct attack on the notionthat mass communication does not tell us what to think. Here, we have the beginningsof what I will call cognitive or psychological approaches to how people processmediated messages. This group of people, rather than abandoning the social scienticapproach, abandoned the notion that mass communication does not affect thinking.Instead, they suggested, that mass communication should not be dened in terms of technological determinism. They argued that professional and content distinctions,driven by the dominant paradigm, made no sense psychologically. Rather, oneshould consider mediated communications as psychologically relevant messages.This perspective, rst championed by Byron Reeves and Esther Thorson, suggestedthat people have evolutionarily old brains, which encounter mass-mediated messagesin the same way that they encounter real messages, and that their automatic and

reexive motivational, cognitive, and emotional responses to mediated messages donot differ, initially, from those they have to real messages.Indeed, initially, this approach was considered to be a friendly amendment to

the dominant paradigm, as demonstrated by its appearance in the rst editionof Perspectives on Media Effects, (Bryant & Zillmann, 1986). Among the content-based, technology-based, and effects-based chapters, we nd chapter 13 (perhaps anunlucky coincidence) called Attention to Television: Psychological Theories andChronometric Measures. In this chapter, theauthors (Reeves, Thorson, & Schleuder,1986) argue that there is an absence of programmatic development in research (p.251). They argue that this is because in order to answer our research questions weneed to begin to study processes that are covert and that these questions requireclose examination of relevant psychological studies (p.251). These authors arguespecically for understanding how mass-mediated messages are processed differently from interpersonal communication messages, if they are. And they argue that the timeduring which the message is processed,what they called intra message processing, is asimportant, or even more important, than the simple number of times we are exposedto messages. I will argue, that this chapter fundamentally called into question thevalue of dominant mass communication research, and that fundamental threat to thedominant paradigm resulted in that chapter being absent from subsequent editions

of the book, until it nally reappeared in 2010.



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During that time, however, research from the psychological perspective grew in frequency, scope, and explanatory power. Other signs of its growth include thecommencement of a journal, Media Psychology , the appearance of text book titleswhich stress the importance of psychology, such as Richard Jackson Harriss ACognitive Psychology of Mass Communication (Harris, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009), anda growing group of scholars, primarily young scholars, who have interdisciplinary training, and who approach questions of mass communication in a fundamentally different way from those still working in the dominant paradigm.

What are the fundamental differences in the nature of mass communication, themethods, and the agreed upon questions that are seen in this group of scholars? First,letus consider the fundamental natureof communication. Recollect that I argued thatthedominant effects paradigm conceptualizes communication as an external force forchange in otherwise stable humans and societies. I also argued that the splinter group

of communication and culture, now perhaps a discipline of their own, views masscommunications as expressions of power operatingon and within relativelymalleablehumans and social systems. As it has developed, I think it is safe to argue that this new and growing psychological group perceives communication as a natural evolutionary development which serves to promote the continued existence of the species and theindividual as it attempts to adapt through change to an unpredictable and unstableenvironment. This sentence is fundamentally opposed to everything about the dom-inant paradigm. First, the environment and therefore societies are seen as changingcontinuously, over time. Second, humans are seen as adapting to those changes. Inother words humans are born to adapt to the world in which they nd themselves,that is to say that humans are born to change. This is why the same baby, placed inany environment, will take on the culture and the norms of the environment in which you place it. The baby was born to adapt. We do not lose that ability to adapt as we ageand grow. The loss of adaptability would doom us to early death in the face of change.Early death would, eventually, doom the species to extinction. All animals, in thisperspective, are seen as adapting to the continuously changing environment. Somehave fewer ways ofadapting than others,and these are more impacted by sudden envi-ronmental change. Some animals, those with a very short life cycle, adapt genetically.For example the moths, in England, that were primarily white, so as not to stand outagainst the white cliffs of Dover. However, when the industrial revolution turned thecliffs grey, within a very short period of time, the moths were alsogrey. When the envi-ronmental movement cleaned up the cliffs, the moths became white again. Humans,however, have a very long life cycle. While we do adapt genetically, signicant geneticchange in the species has not occurred for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead,we adapt through genetic diversity across individuals and by using our giant frontallobes, which allow us to exert a phenomenal amount of control on our surroundingsand on each other. One of the ways in which we do that is by communicating. We didnot develop communication because it is nonadaptive. We do not use communica-tion to persuade, to inform, to make love, or to tell jokes because those activities are

nonadaptive or because communication is not capable of inuencing those activities.



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Thus, like our colleagues in communication and culture, this splinter groupbelieves that communication is fundamentally powerful and adaptive. However,unlike our colleagues in communication and culture, we believe that science can be

used to understand howcommunication messages are processed,howthat processinginuences what a person remembers and takes away from the message, and how they respond emotionally to the message, and that understanding this interactionthoroughly will allow us to nd the mechanisms and parameters which describe theways that communication contributes to the organization of behavior.

Thus, this new understanding of the fundamental nature of mass communicationincludes the notion that both interpersonal and mass communication are adaptiveproperties of human systems. Humans are motivated, cognitive systems embeddedin social systems, both of which are continuously changing over time. Hence, theapproach is one of dynamic systems whose properties can be understood, modeled,and used to predict future behavior.

From this perspective, the whole notion of effects is ridiculous (see for example,Lang & Ewoldsen, 2010). An effect must have a start point, which is stable, and an endpoint, which is the change. The dynamic systems approach simply cannot accommo-date this notion. Rather,change is. While the system may havestates that are more sta-ble and states that are less stable, it is, nonetheless, built to change, and it does change.Changes are the result of a combination of environmental pressures and stimuli, aswell as internal forces such as development, education, and biological imperatives.Regardless of the circumstances and source of stimuli, the system is always changing.

Our goal is to learn to model and understand that change. Our goal is to dene com-munication, not in termsofprofessions(journalism,advertising,publicrelations),notin termsofcontents (violent,sexual, political, persuasive),andnotin terms ofmediumof carriage (interpersonal, radio, movies, television, World Wide Web). Instead, wemust redene communication in terms of its psychologically relevant characteristics.

What are psychologically relevant characteristics? Within this approach, severalhave been suggested and investigated across media platforms including motion,size, light, color, discontinuous change, speed, and motivational relevance. It isnot a complete list, but you can see the difference between these types of variablecharacteristics, which exist for all communication messages and for all vehiclesof carriage, including interpersonal communication and other more prominentdenitions of communication, which serve to separate communications and mediainto qualitatively different kinds and then explicate how those different kinds functionto inuence change. This perspective, unlike the effects perspective held captive by midrange theorizing, seeks to develop, and indeed expects to develop a general theory of communicationone that will, eventually, be able to predict the human messageinteraction, and to predict, what the message recipient will take away from thatinteraction as a function of the psychologically relevant characteristics of the message,and perhaps to make some predictions about how later behavioral decisions will be

made as a result of those communications.



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It is interesting to note that one psychologically relevant variable that exists for allcontents and media is weight of exposure. The frequency and duration with whicha message is encountered is an extremely psychologically relevant aspect of any message. If, as animals in a dangerous environment, we failed to note the frequency with which predators appeared in this area as opposed to some other area, or failed tonote the frequency with which food grew on this hill compared to that hill, we wouldnot survive long. Indeed, current cognitive theories suggest that frequency countingis an automatic offshoot of neurological ring. We have a sense of how often we haveencountered a thing in a place and over a lifetime which we gain without effort. Asmentioned above, frequency of exposure is probably the most successful predictivevariable in every mass communication effects theory. This may be because it isalmost the only psychologically relevant variable that has been consistently studiedin our eld. Every other psychologically relevant variable has lost its variableness in

the current paradigm.What do I mean by lost its variableness? What I mean is that rather than keepingand studying what happens across the entire range of a psychologically relevantvariable, we break them into categories and levels, and then use those categoriesto dene the specic medium, message, or person to whom our midrange theory applies. Thus, the psychologically relevant variables have been separated from theircontinuum and used, instead, to create kinds of media and messages to study, ratherthan manipulated across their range to understand interactive communication.

For example, take motivational relevance, an extremely powerful adaptive psy-chological variable which is almost completely missing in our eld. Why? First, whatdo I mean by motivational relevance. From the evolutionary perspective, which isfundamental to this new approach to communication, motivational relevance, is theextent to which a given stimulus is a threat or an opportunity. Basic motivationalthreats include attack, predators, and other sorts of physical danger.Basic opportuni-ties include food and sex. The ability to avoid threat and capitalize on opportunitiesincreases the success of the individual and the survival of the species. For this reason,motivational systems designed by evolution to encourage defensive and approachbehaviorsarehardwired into ourphysicalchassis andautomatically andcovertlyguideour interactions with our environment, including our media environment. But in thetypical paradigmatically driven effects study, motivational relevance is not a variable,it is a content type. Those who study violence are studying the type of content whichcontains primary motivational information about threat. It is a type of content whichautomatically activates the defensive motivational system, which has predictable,although not yet fully understood, effects on the processing and storage of informa-tion, and the usefulness of that information for later decision-making. However, by studying this type of content by itself, separated from other types of motivationally relevant content and from content which is not particularly motivationally relevant,we fail to learn the nature and extent of these inuences on human behavior.

Also, from this new approach, we gain a conception of communication as an

interaction betweena message and a human embedded in an environment that occurs



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over time. Thus communication is not the message, and it is not what the humanreceived, but rather it is the overtime interaction of the message, the human, and theenvironment. Our goal, as scientists, is to come to thoroughly understand that overtime interaction. To understand things which happen automatically and reexively,to understand how individual differences inuence the outcome of automatic andreexive processes, to understand how information is selected from the environment(including the message) and stored, as a function of those psychologically relevantvariables, and to understand howdifferent types of environment alter the interaction.It is worth noting here that recent research in the eld, in particular research on new media, has focused on interactivity as a key variable. I would argue here, however,that they are wrong in suggesting that interactivity is an important variable. Ratherinteractivity is an important aspect of the fundamental nature of communication.Humans interact continuously with their environment, indeed when prevented

from interacting (for example through sensory deprivation), they go mad. Once weunderstand that, then, we can look at how different types and forms of interaction,but not the absence of interaction, play a fundamental role in the dynamic system.

To summarize, what is coming out of this new approach to studying mass com-munication is a fundamentally new conception of communication, a fundamentally new set of methods, which are primarily cognitive, mathematical, and experimental,and a new agreement on the fundamental questions of communication research.Things that were used to dene communication in the past (medium, goal of thecommunicator, and content) are variables in a new general theoryof communication.Our primary question is not, is there an effect of communication? Indeed, to theextent that we can even talk about effects, in this new approach, they are continuous,and mass communication, like any other environmental stimulus, has the powerto elicit them. Instead, our questions demand that we: (a) identify and understandthe psychologically relevant features of all existing media and all media yet to bedeveloped as they arise; (b) That we dene all the various contents of mediatedand unmediated messages in terms of their psychological relevance, not in terms of their goals and content; (c) That as we identify these variables, we then learn how they inuence motivational, affective, and cognitive responses within the motivatedcognitive information processing system that is a human being; and (d) That weexplore how this interaction is inuenced by environment. We must understandhow varying the motivational relevance, or the attention-eliciting structural features,or the pace at which the message is presented, or the environment in which it isperceived inuence what aspects of the message are selected for further processing,how well those aspects of the message are stored, and their accessibility, relevance,and inuence later in time when a person is making a decision about how to act.

Coming into the new paradigm does not mean that we have to give up socially relevant questions about how specic types of content may inuence thoughts andbehavior. Rather, it allows us to begin understanding the mechanisms by whichthe content in the mediated message is transferred into a persons memory and is

made available to the person when they are undertaking an action. We are no longer



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limited, in this paradigm, to simple empirical observation. Our results do not have tobe empirical generalizations. Instead, we ought, eventually, be able to predict basedon psychologically relevant aspects of media, coupled with psychologically relevant

individual differences, way more than 3% of the variance in real-time processingand, by examining psychologically relevant variables like frequency, intensity, andpattern of exposure, its impact on future behavior.

Nordowehavetogiveupourinterestinorfocusonbehavior.Rather,asweunder-stand the interaction with the message, and begin to understand how the real timehuman-message interaction relates to the later availabilityof message information,wecan begin to predict what kinds of productions will make what kinds of informationmore accessible, and more likely to be consultedby more people at the point of action.

We can also begin to ask that question for different groups of people. Here again,however,theshiftinthefundamentalnatureoftheconceptualdenitionofcommuni-cationwill demand anaccompanyingchangein ourselectionof individual differences.Theindividualdifference variablesof importance arenotgoing tobe thesame individ-ual differences that were relevant to the old paradigm. The vast majority of research inmass communication,under theeffects paradigm,hasfocused on socially relevant andrelatively stable individual differences such as income, education, gender, racemostof which are variables that contribute to our stability as individuals and our place inthe stable society. Within this new paradigm, the individualdifferences of importancewill be those that inuence psychological, emotional, and motivational responding.We have already seen some of these variables emerging in the eld such as need for

cognition, emotional intelligence, and motivational reactivity. These variables willinuence the system both as a person is interacting with the message and later onwhen a person is preparing for related action. They are variables which inuence thelikely patterns of stability and instability in the message/human/environment inter-action. For this reason, these individual differences should rmly link the real-timeembedded message interaction and the projected embedded actions.

I have given short shrift to the change in methodology that I am suggesting comeswith the new paradigm, perhaps because I think methodological shifts are so muchmore easily seen than shifts in fundamental assumptions. However, briey, I think that, as in the old paradigm, the methodological approach will continue to be socialscientic, though perhaps with less emphasis on the social and more on the scientic.The data that we will want to collect will be collected with even more difcultly than the data collected in the old paradigm. If our goal is to study covert, reexive,and automatic processing we cannot ask our subjects what or how they think. Thesurvey method, although it may help to suggest areas in which we might look formechanisms of processing and change, cannot give us access to the mechanisms of processing, emotional responding, motivation, memory accessibility, etc. rather, wewill need methods that can track covert, automatic, and reexive processes.

Indeed,sincethe1980swehavebeguntoseriouslyincorporateintooureldexper-

imental methodologies borrowed from psychology, from cognitive science, and from



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psychophysiology. The use of thesemethods is growing, and their ability to tell us sur-prising things about how messages are processed has become almost accepted. How-ever, future methodological innovations are likely to be evenmore difcult than those

in the past. Redening communication as a fundamental and natural aspect of nesteddynamic systems embedded in and adapting to an environment will require that weceasetopaymerelipservicetotheconceptoftimeandthatweabsolutelyacceptthatwemust measure everything over time. Over-time measurement, however, will producemassive data sets that cannot easily be subjected to standard static statistical analyses.The future will likely demand an understanding of dynamic systems theory coupledwith skills in building complex cognitive, emotional, and motivational models of theinteraction of a message and the human who encounters it. (Our interpersonal col-leagues may have an even more difcult task as they will need to model the interactionof two humans simultaneously producing, emitting, and processing messages.) Theneed for interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative teams is likely just beginning.The days when we did not need to learn to program or build models or have a labo-ratory, complete with technical support and complex machines that measure varioustypes of covert responses, may be coming to an end. Indeed, this may be the biggestobstacle to progress in this new approach. Even now as young scholars in the new paradigm developand try to publish sophisticated modelsof message/human interac-tionandlaterchoicebehavior,reviewersandeditorsarestrugglingwiththecomplexity and difculty of the papers and expressing concern that communication journalaudiences will not be able to understand nor be interested in this kind of research.

So, where do we go from here? Only time will tell. However, I do not believe thatthe discipline can survive much longer as a science if we continue to have only onesuccessful independent variable (i.e., weight of coverage) and one generalizable result(i.e., the media have very small, weak, but persistent effects on peoples behavior). Ind that state ofaffairs tobe not onlydisheartening but absolutely inexplicable when Ilook out at the world around me. I see media inuencing peoples behavior everyplaceI look. I see society changing fantastically as a function of media and media content.Like those who joined the ranks of the communication and culture discipline, I canno longer support the conclusions of my own paradigm nor can I see the sense or theworth of much of the research taking place under its (somewhat tattered) umbrella.Unlike them, however, I believe science can help us to understand the power of allmessages in all media on all people in all contexts. We must have theories which easily embrace new media, rather than calling for new theory every time there is a new medium. I believe that if mass communication is to grow as a science we will have toembrace the difculties ahead of us. We must learn to understand communication asa fundamental, dynamic, natural aspect of human adaptation to the environment. Wemust understand mass communication as simply an extension of what humans do,although a very important one. We must redene media in terms of human-centricvariables.We must understand howvariations in message production inuence every

aspect of human behavior. The future is scary but I believe it is also bright.



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Note

1 A radio adaptation of Orson Welless War of the Worlds was broadcast in 1938 in theUnited States. The broadcast reports an ongoing invasion from Mars. Many listeners

thought the broadcast was real and ed their homes in panic.

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Lowery, S., & DeFleur, M. L. (1995). Milestones in mass communication research: Media effects(3rd ed.). White Plains, NY: Longman.

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131143). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Potter, W. J. (1993). The three paradigms of mass media research in mainstream

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