What We Know About the Effects of Mass Communication: The Brink of Hope

The "brink of hope" for research in mass communications, according to this author, lies in a new orientation toward its study and some resulting generalizations which order many of the seemingly diverse and unrelated findings. This article contains a description of the new orientation, of the emerging generalizations, and of the findings which they may mold into a body of organized knowledge. Joseph T. Klapper is Mass Communication Consultant with General Electric. At the time this article was written, he was Research Associate at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. T WENTY YEARS ago writers who undertook to discuss mass communication typically felt obliged to define that unfamiliar term. In the intervening years conjecture and research upon the topic, particularly in reference to the effects of mass communication, have burgeoned. The literature has reached that stage of profusion and disarray, characteristic of all burgeoning disciplines, at which researchers and research administrators speak wistfully of establishing centers where the cascading data might be sifted and stored. The field has grown to the point at which its practitioners are periodically asked by other researchers to attempt to assess the cascade, to determine whither we are tumbling, to atempt to assess, in short, "what we know about the effects of mass communication." The present paper is one attempt to partially answer that question. The author is well aware that the possibility of bringing any order to this field is regarded in some quarters with increasing pessimism. The paper will acknowledge and document this pessimism, but it will neither condone nor share it. It will rather propose that we have come at last to the brink of