journal of communication volume 33 issue 3 1983 [doi 10.1111_j.1460-2466.1983.tb02415.x] james g....

7/27/2019 Journal of Communication Volume 33 issue 3 1983 [doi 10.1111_j.1460-2466.1983.tb02415.x] James G. Stappers -

1/5

M a ss C o m m u n i c a t i o nas P u blic C o m m u n i c a t i o nby James C . Stappers

Acts of communication in which knowledge ismade available without restricting who mayreceive it constitute public communication,and it is the public digusion of this knowledgethat should be the object of our study.On e of1 he major obstacles that mass communications research has had toovercome is problems with its very name-mass communicat ions. Theterm has been useful in capturing the attention of researchers in otherfields and the general population, bu t has obscured the importance anddevelopment of models of the communications process not der ived fromthe sender-receiver formulation. As Edelste in im plied as early i t s 1966,Undoubtedly the greatest misapprehension is incorporated in thephrase the cqfects of m u s s communication, (2 , p. 115).Not only haseffects proved to be a troublesome issue, but th e notion of mass asrelated to communication has been conftising and difficult to define.

Indeed , it is hard to understand why the word has found its way intothe languages of Europe : Massenkommunikation in Ge rman, Com-munication cle masse in French. The Frenc h particularly disliked thecommunication part of the expression, because for them it de notes theresult of a process, rather than the process itself. Ev en the Americans didnot really l i k e it; although they may have been certain about whatcommunicating is, they were not so sure as to what part or aspectshould be called communication. Many authors thus distinguishbetwe en communication on on e hand and true or real or accu-rate communication on the other hand. Th e Fren ch preferred t he term

James G . Stappers i s P r o fe s s o r a t t h e I n s t i t u t e f o r Mass C o m m u n i c a t i o n , C a t h o l i cU n i v e rs i ty , N i j m e g e n , The N e t h e r l a n d s .

14 1


2/5

Journal of Communication, Summer 1983

information, and to some extent still do, as for instance in AssociationInternationale des Etudes et Recherches sur 1Information (AIERI) ,which else whe re is called International Association for Mass Commu-nication Research ( IAMCR). It seems that no one has liked the wordmass ever since LeBon coined the word; it has become associatedwith a somewhat indiscriminate agglomerate of people of low morality,responsibility, and intelligence.

Nevertheless, mass communication was introduced after WorldWar 11, along with other Americanisms like Coca-Cola and 7-Up, andaccepted as a technical term. But the unfamiliar, strange, and somewhatcontradictory term impeded recognition that the term in fact covered aphenomenon already well known under other names. By 1960, Klappercould write: Twenty years ago, writers who undertook to discuss masscommunication typically felt obliged to define that then unfamiliarterm (5,p. 1).He himself shows no such feelings of obligation, as if thefamiliarity with the term had itself solved the problem.

The fa ct that the cont inental Europeans didnot use the te rm mass commu nicat ion does notimp ly tha t they were unfamil iar w i th the phenomenon.By the late 1920s, there was already a solid tradition of studying not

only the press, but also other media such as film and radio, as well asother forms ofp ub lic expression. Scholars in this period realized that thestudy of public communication, born at the crossroads of several disci-plines a nd nu rtured by many of those sciences, was a nd needed to be adiscipline in its own right (8,p. 126).

Contemporary students of literature and art who are discoveringmedia-science-as, for example, Williams (9) seems to be doing-are,

according to Lerg (7, p. 24), epistemologically at the level of theZeitungswissenschaft of 1925. The common element of all those phe-nomena that Zeitungswissenschuft (later PublizistikwisserischcLft) wasstudying was public communication. This term implied more thanmerely the activities of the mass media. Because publ ic communic a onis public in the sense of excluding no one from its messages, it followsthat any numb er of people can become receivers; such a group of peoplemay or may not be called a mass, de pend ing on the circumstances.There are obviously more listeners for a popular radio program at 8 P .M .than for a serious radio program at 11:30 P.M., but these groups need notbe labeled differently; they should both be objects of study by the samediscipline. For all practical purposes, then, mass communication canbe considered equ iva lent to pub lic communication. Whatever differ-ences exist between the two may be relevant for telecommunicationsengineering, but not for a social science.

>,

142


3/5

Mass Communication as Public Communication

In the U.S. literature, the term mass communication is used ei the ras an equ iva len t of public communication or as a name for those formsof public communication that take place through the use of so-calledmass media, which ar e special technical means that make it possible toreach large numbers of people with identical messages almost simulta-neously. It seems to be extremely difficult to formulate a definition of

mass media independent of mass communication; in any case,when something becomes public knowledge, the technical meansthrough which that occurred are relatively unimportant. Several authors,mainly American, consider the mass med ia to be a necessary conditionfor mass conimunication.

There are, however, o the r ways of restricting the term mass commu-nication. Wiebe wrote that, whe n w e speak of a mass audience, werefer not to thousands or hundreds of thousands, but to millions ofpeo ple in the United States. Th us , many communications often spokenof as mass communication are excluded from our discussion (4, p. 160-161).Given the size of th e nations-and the language areas-we wouldexclude practically all European news papers, to take just one example,from the category of mass media if we did not consider hundreds ofthousands to constitute a mass. Of course, such a drastic definitiondoes not hold even for the United States. As Wie be remarks a few pages

I

143


4/5

Journal of Communication, Summer 1983

later, mass communications are the nations shared experiences (4, p.266). Hence we need not restrict oiirselves to the study of those itemsshared b y the millions; if they have been made public, they have beenmade available to the millions even if not necessarily shared by them.All information that has become public, e ithe r through formal media(6,p. 51)or through informal mass communication ( l ) , ecomes integrat-ed into the same body of common knowledge. Thus , all public communi-cation can be seen a nd studied as one interdepen dent whole. Researchon rumors, gossip, grapevines, and other informal and interpersonalcommunication has clearly shown that these are extensions, surrogates,complements, corrections, or competitors for the media. They should beregarded as informal public communication, or informal mass communi-cation, because they serve to make public information that was carriedby the media or could, might, or should have be en, de pen din g on thepublic. All these forms are efforts to build up a body of public informa-tion, in which anybody can share-at one moment a s a producer ofmessages, at the next moment as a consumer-and they have much incommon with the institutionalized media and with graffiti, samizdats,underground papers, and pirate radio stations.

The object of the study of masscommunication is public-making, not justpublic-making through the so-called mass media.The word public in the European context has at least three

meanings: a public, an amorphous social structure; public as a quality ofinformation, the awareness that it is known to many and commonlyknown that it is known to many (3 ,pp. 139-140); and public in the senseof the collective knowledge of many, which may or may not lead toaction. The difference between th e second and third meanings might beconsidered akin to the difference between a n adverb (p ubl ic communi-cation = publicly communicating) and an adjective (pub lic knowledge,public sphere) . This threefold meaning is expressed most clearly in theGerman word Offentlichkeit, which incorporates all three meanings-apublic, the quality of being public, and the public sphere.

Mass communication is publ ic communication-such acts of commu-nication in which knowledge (information, attitudes, ideas, feelings) ismade available without restricting who may be the receiver. Once a firststep has been made without restriction, it is pointless to restrict subse-quent steps. Even if the initial medium has been a small one, theinformation can be picked up by another, or by several others, and noone can stop the spread of information. What the media do is simplymake something publicly available; for that something to becomepublicly known requires some action on the part of the public. There-fore, the main questions for a science of mass communication are: how

144


5/5

Mass Communication as Puhlic Communication

do things get generally known; why art: they or why are they notgenerally known; when are they and when are they not generallyknown.

In attempting to answer these questions, researchers have generallystudied the media-the major niedia , that i s , the ones whose mreach the majiority of the peo ple, or eventually the majority o fth e peoplein a given area. Social scientists thus are aligiied with the propagandist,the advertiser, the seller of information. What they should study,however, is how and why information become generally availalo.le, howand why people spread the newly acquired knowledge, how and whythey share the information. It is people, not the niedia, who play theimportant part in the diffusion of information. The piililic milst be putback in mass cornmunicatioiis research, not o n l y in the sense of findingout what people d o with the m edia, hiit in the sense of attempting tounderstand t h e problems of the diffusion of information or put)licknowledge. If the diffusion of common knowledge necessary to solve ourcommon proLlems is our object ofstitdy, w e should begin our study withthose who are doing the sharing of that iiiforrnation.

New media have always commanded the most attention (i.e., themost research money) l>ecanse they are iiivarialily suspected of beingthe most powerful agents in the creation of public conscio~~sness-probably because the old media have invariably proven to be lesseffective than was hoped-or feared . Powerful interests are presentlybehind the new media, promoting their introduction and most l ike lyensurin g their success. This can o n l y increase the likelihood of fiindsbeing made available for studying new media rather than th e role ofpeople in making relevant information public.

REFERENCES1.

2.3.4.5.6.

7.8.

9.

14 5

journal of communication volume 33 issue 3 1983 [doi 10.1111_j.1460-2466.1983.tb02415.x] james g....

Documents