Experiments on mass communication. Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Vol. III.

1950 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-141
Author(s):  
Allen L. Edwards
1950 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 448
Author(s):  
Clyde W. Hart ◽  
Carl I. Hovland ◽  
Arthur A. Lumsdaine ◽  
Fred D. Sheffield

Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Hanson

The intellectual impetus for international communication research has come from a variety of disciplines, notably political science, sociology, psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and, of course, communication science and international relations. Although highly diverse in content, international communication scholarship, past and current, falls into distinct research traditions or areas of inquiry. The content and focus of these have changed over time in response to innovations in communication technologies and to the political environment. The development and spread of radio and film in the 1920s and 1930s increased public awareness and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the mass media and in issues regarding the impact on public opinion. The extensive use of propaganda as an instrument of policy by all sides in World War I, and the participation of social scientists in the development of this instrument, provided an impetus for the development of both mass communication and international communication studies. There was a heavy emphasis on the micro level effects, the process of persuasion. Strategic considerations prior to and during World War II reinforced this emphasis. World War II became an important catalyst for research in mass communication. Analytical tools of communication research were applied to the tasks of mobilizing domestic public support for the war, understanding enemy propaganda, and developing psychological warfare techniques to influence the morale and opinion of allied and enemy populations. During the Cold War, U.S foreign policy goals continued to shape the direction of much research in international communication, notably “winning hearts and minds” of strategically important populations in the context of the East-West conflict. As new states began to emerge from colonial empires, communication became an important component of research on development. “Development research” emphasized the role of the mass media in guiding and accelerating development. This paradigm shaped both national and international development programs throughout the 1960’s. It resurfaced in the 1980s with a focus on telecommunication, and again in the 1990s, in modified form under the comprehensive label “information and communication technologies for development.” Development communication met serious criticism in the 1970s as the more general modernization paradigm was challenged. The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s inspired a vast literature on their impact on the global economy, foreign policy, the nation state and, more broadly, on their impact on power structures and social change. The beginning of the 21st century marks a transition point as the scholarship begins to respond to multiple new forms of communication and to new directions taken by the technologies that developed and spread in the latter part of the previous century


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 513-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Simonson ◽  
Junya Morooka ◽  
Bingjuan Xiong ◽  
Nathan Bedsole

Abstract Mass communication was one of the central signs through which communication research constituted itself in the post-World War II era. An American term, it indexed and communicatively advanced the problematization of media that took shape from the 1920s onward. Recently, scholars have debated the term’s continued relevance, typically without awareness of its history or international contexts of use. To provide needed background and enrich efforts to globalize the field, we offer a transnational history of mass communication, illuminating the sociological, cultural, and geopolitical dynamics of its emergence, dissemination, and reception. Mapping locations of its adoption, adaption, and rejection across world regions, we offer a methodology and a historical narrative to shed light on the early globalization of the field and lines of power and resistance that shaped it. We show how the term carries a residue of postwar American hegemony, and argue for greater reflexive awareness of our vocabularies of inquiry.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-601
Author(s):  
Friedrich Cain

The article explores the sociopsychological considerations made by Polish sociologist Stanisław Ossowski (1897-1963) during World War II in reaction to his specific experiences in Soviet-occupied Lwów and German-occupied Warsaw. Based on readings of Ossowski’s publications and so far unpublished archival material, the influences and practical consequences of permanently observed violations of ethical and moral boundaries in that “great sociological laboratory” of war and occupation shall be traced in the texts he wrote during that time. As a member of a group of engineers, town planners, and architects, Ossowski sketched various psycho- and sociotechnical means of controlling that should guarantee for a peaceful social existence of free individuals in a new Polish state. Particular attention will be directed to the specific difficulties of attaining, communicating, and distributing knowledge in the de facto doubled cities that developed along the lines of opposition between the occupying and the occupied.


1950 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 811
Author(s):  
F. Stuart Chapin ◽  
Samuel A. Stouffer ◽  
Louis Guttman ◽  
Edward A. Suchman ◽  
Paul F. Lazarsfeld ◽  
...  

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