Mass Communication: Some Issues Beyond the Data

Reviews the book, The Science of Human Communication edited by Wilbur Schramm (1963). In his introductory chapter Dr. Schramm documents the existence of this eclectic new science and traces its rise back to the efforts of Lewin, Hovland and Lazarsfeld and to the research centers that they established. While he succeeds, as does the book as a whole, in demonstrating that there is indeed quite a lot of research on communication processes going on these days, the question of why it has all come about as it has is one that requires closer scrutiny. It is a possible paradox that those communication researchers who have been independent of the communications industry are the ones who have been rather directly concerned with identifying the factors that affect the persuasive power of communication. In the present volume, men of deservedly large reputation have provided useful and succinct summaries of their recent research. Yet the book as a whole is unrealistically sanguine and reassuring on issues that continue to provoke desperate concern from many thoughtful journalists and statesmen, and even from some academicians. The science of human communication would do well to look beyond its data to the larger social world which is the context out of which those data have been torn. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)