Journalism and Mass Communication II: Models and Theories of Mass Communication, Normative Theories, the Administrative and Critical Traditions, Theories of Change, Technological Determinism, McLuhan and Marxist Approaches, and Information and Knowledge Societies

Normative theories do not describe what the media do; they state what the media ought to do in a given political system. Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm's Four Theories of the Press (1956) set out four. Authoritarian theory, drawn from monarchies, holds that the press serves the state and is licensed and censored. Libertarian theory, drawn from Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Locke and Mill, holds that truth emerges from a free marketplace of ideas and that the press should be free of the state. Social responsibility theory, from the report of the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947), keeps freedom but adds obligations: truthful, comprehensive and contextual news, a forum for comment, a representative picture of social groups. Soviet communist theory made the press an instrument of the party.

Denis McQuail added two in the 1980s. Development media theory, suited to newly independent countries, asks the media to support national development, cultural autonomy and nation-building, and accepts some state guidance to that end. Democratic-participant theory, a reaction against both commercial and state media, favours small-scale, horizontal, community media in which citizens take part. Critics note that the original four were written during the Cold War and read other systems through an American lens; later work, such as Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems (2004), replaced normative typologies with empirical comparison.

Effects research moved through three broad phases. The first assumed powerful, direct effects: the hypodermic needle or magic bullet idea, shaped by wartime propaganda and the panic reported after Orson Welles's radio play The War of the Worlds (1938). The second found limited effects. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet's The People's Choice (1944), a study of the 1940 presidential election in Erie County, Ohio, found that media messages reached many voters through opinion leaders, the two-step flow; Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld developed it in Personal Influence (1955). Joseph Klapper's The Effects of Mass Communication (1960) concluded that media mostly reinforce existing attitudes. The third phase returned to powerful but indirect, long-term and cognitive effects.

In a 1941 essay Paul Lazarsfeld distinguished administrative research, which serves media organisations and governments by measuring audiences and effects so that messages can be made more effective, from critical research, which asks what media do to society and whose interests the whole system serves. The administrative tradition, largely American and quantitative, produced the effects studies above. The critical tradition has several branches. The Frankfurt School's Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, published 1947), described a "culture industry" that mass-produces standardised culture and makes audiences passive. Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) traced the rise and commercial decline of a space for rational public debate.

Marxist approaches start from the base and superstructure: the economic base shapes ideas, law and culture, and the class that owns the means of material production also controls the means of mental production. Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony explains how a ruling order wins consent rather than relying on force, with media as a site where common sense is made. Louis Althusser (1970) listed the media among the ideological state apparatuses, beside school, family and church, that reproduce the relations of production. The political economy school, with Herbert Schiller's Mass Communications and American Empire (1969), Dallas Smythe's idea of the audience as the commodity sold to advertisers, and Graham Murdock and Peter Golding's work on ownership, studies who owns and funds the media. Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model (1988) belongs here.

British cultural studies, centred on the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (founded 1964 by Richard Hoggart), turned from production to meaning. Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (1973) argued that audiences may decode a message in a dominant-hegemonic way, accepting the preferred meaning, a negotiated way, accepting it in general while adapting it locally, or an oppositional way, reading against it. This restored the active audience that the culture-industry thesis had lost, without abandoning the critical question of power.

Technological determinism holds that a society's dominant communication technology shapes its social organisation and ways of thinking. The Canadian economic historian Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), distinguished time-biased media, durable and hard to move, such as stone and clay, which favour tradition, religion and continuity, from space-biased media, light and portable, such as papyrus and paper, which favour administration over large territories. His student Marshall McLuhan went further. The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) argued that print created linear, individualist, nationalist "typographic man"; Understanding Media (1964) coined "the medium is the message", meaning that a medium's form changes the scale and pattern of human affairs more than any content it carries, and described media as extensions of man and electronic media as creating a "global village".

McLuhan also divided media into hot and cool. A hot medium extends one sense in high definition and leaves little for the audience to fill in, so it invites low participation: radio, film, the photograph and print. A cool medium is low in definition and demands high participation: the telephone, speech, the cartoon and, in his account, television. The critique is sharp. Raymond Williams, in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), argued that technologies are developed and used within social, economic and political intentions, so treating them as causes hides the choices of the people who control them. Critics also call McLuhan's claims untestable and his hot-cool scheme inconsistent. His defenders reply that he was right to insist that form matters, a point social media have made newly persuasive.

Theories linking communication to socio-cultural, educational and agricultural change grew from rural sociology and modernisation theory. Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross's study of hybrid seed corn among Iowa farmers (1943) founded diffusion research, which Everett Rogers synthesised in Diffusion of Innovations (1962): an innovation passes through knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation, and adopters fall into innovators (2.5 per cent), early adopters (13.5), early majority (34), late majority (34) and laggards (16). Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) tied modernisation to empathy spread by media, and Wilbur Schramm's Mass Media and National Development (1964), written for UNESCO, made media multipliers of development. In India the Poona radio rural forum experiment (1956), Krishi Darshan (1967), SITE (1975–76) and the Kheda Communication Project applied these ideas to agriculture and education; Chapter 4 examines the critique they later met.

The information society thesis holds that information has replaced industrial production as the main source of wealth and work. Fritz Machlup measured the "knowledge industry" in 1962; Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) described a service economy led by theoretical knowledge; Marc Porat (1977) measured an information economy; Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980) described a post-industrial civilisation and the "prosumer"; Manuel Castells's The Rise of the Network Society (1996) placed networks at the centre of economy and power. The knowledge society is the broader, normative idea UNESCO's Towards Knowledge Societies (2005) preferred: not merely more information but the capacity to turn it into knowledge for human development, with attention to the digital divide the World Summit on the Information Society (Geneva 2003, Tunis 2005) addressed.