1The Internet as Mass Medium.docx

1、1The Internet as Mass MediumThe Internet as Mass MediumMerrill Morris Christine Ogan Indiana University IntroductionThe Internet has become impossible to ignore in the past two years. Even people who do not own a computer and have no opportunity to surf the net could not have missed the news stories

2、 about the Internet, many of which speculate about its effects on the ever-increasing number of people who are on line. Why, then, have communications researchers, historically concerned with exploring the effects of mass media, nearly ignored the Internet? With 25 million people estimated to be com

3、municating on the Internet, should communication researchers now consider this network of networks a mass medium? Until recently, mass communications researchers have overlooked not only the Internet but the entire field of computer-mediated communication, staying instead with the traditional forms

4、of broadcast and print media that fit much more conveniently into models for appropriate research topics and theories of mass communication. However, this paper argues that if mass communications researchers continue to largely disregard the research potential of the Internet, their theories about c

5、ommunication will become less useful. Not only will the discipline be left behind, it will also miss an opportunity to explore and rethink answers to some of the central questions of mass communications research, questions that go to the heart of the model of source-message-receiver with which the f

6、ield has struggled. This paper proposes a conceptualization of the Internet as a mass medium, based on revised ideas of what constitutes a mass audience and a mediating technology. The computer as a new communication technology opens a space for scholars to rethink assumptions and categories, and pe

7、rhaps even to find new insights into traditional communication technologies. This paper looks at the Internet, rather than computer-mediated communication as a whole, in order to place the new medium within the context of other mass media. Mass media researchers have traditionally organized themselv

8、es around a specific communications medium. The newspaper, for instance, is a more precisely defined area of interest than printing-press-mediated communication, which embraces more specialized areas, such as company brochures or wedding invitations. Of course, there is far more than a semantic diff

9、erence between conceptualizing a new communication technology by its communicative form than by the technology itself. The tradition of mass communication research has accepted newspapers, radio, and television as its objects of study for social, political, and economic reasons. As technology change

10、s and media converge, those research categories must become flexible. Constraints on Internet ResearchMass communications researchers have overlooked the potential of the Internet for several reasons. The Internet was developed in bits and pieces by hobbyists, students, and academics (Rheingold, 199

11、4). It didnt fit researchers ideas about mass media, locked, as they have been, into models of print and broadcast media. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) at first resembled interpersonal communication and was relegated to the domain of other fields, such as education, management information sc

12、ience, and library science. These fields, in fact, have been doing research into CMC for nearly 20 years (Dennis & Gallupe, 1993; OShea & Self, 1983), and many of their ideas about CMC have proven useful in looking at the phenomenon as a mass medium. Both education and business researchers have seen

13、 the computer as a technology through which communication was mediated, and both lines of research have been concerned with the effects of this new medium. Disciplinary lines have long kept researchers from seeing the whole picture of the communication process. Cathcart and Gumpert (1983) recognized

14、 this problem when they noted how speech communication definitions have minimized the role of media and channel in the communication process (p. 267), even as mass communication definitions disregarded the ways media function in interpersonal communication: We are quite convinced that the traditiona

15、l division of communication study into interpersonal, group and public, and mass communication is inadequate because it ignores the pervasiveness of media (p. 268). The major constraint on doing mass communication research into the Internet, however, has been theoretical. In searching for theories t

16、o apply to group software systems, researchers in MIS have recognized that communication studies needed new theoretical models: The emergence of new technologies such as GSS (Group Support Systems, software that allows group decision-making), which combine aspects of both interpersonal interaction a

17、nd mass media, presents something of a challenge to communication theory. With new technologies, the line between the various contexts begins to blur, and it is unclear that models based on mass media or face-to-face contexts are adequate (Poole & Jackson, 1993, p. 282). Not only have theoretical mo

18、dels constrained research, but the most basic assumptions behind researchers theories of mass media effects have kept them from being able to see the Internet as a new mass medium. DeFleur and Ball-Rokeachs attitude toward computers in the fifth edition of their Theories of Mass Communication (1989)

19、 is typical. They compare computers to telephones, dismissing the idea of computer communication as mass communication: Even if computer literacy were to become universal, and even if every household had a personal computer equipped with a modem, it is difficult to see how a new system of mass commu

20、nication could develop from this base alone (pp. 335-336). The fact that DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach find it difficult to envision this development may well be a result of their own constrained perspective. Taking the telephone analogy a step further, Lana Rakow (1992) points out that the lack of resea

21、rch on the telephone was due in part to researchers inability to see it as a mass medium. The telephone also became linked to women, who embraced the medium as a way to overcome social isolation. Rethinking DefinitionsHowever, a new communication technology can throw the facades of the old into shar

22、p relief. Marshall McLuhan (1960) recognized this when, speaking of the computer, he wrote, The advent of a new medium often reveals the lineaments and assumptions, as it were, of an old medium (p. 567). In effect, a new communication technology may perform an almost postmodern function of making th

23、e unpresentable perceptible, as Lyotard (1983) might put it. In creating new configurations of sources, messages, and receivers, new communication technologies force researchers to examine their old definitions. What is a mass audience? What is a communication medium? How are messages mediated? Dani

24、el Bell (1960) recognized the slippery nature of the term mass society and how its many definitions lacked a sense of reality: What strikes one about these varied uses of the concept of mass society is how little they reflect or relate to the complex, richly striated social relations of the real wor

25、ld (p. 25). Similarly, the term mass media, with its roots in ideas of mass society, has always been difficult to define. There is much at stake in hanging on to traditional definitions of mass media, as shown in the considerable anxiety in recent years over the loss of the mass audience and its imp

26、lications for the liberal pluralist state. The convergence of communication technologies, as represented by the computer, has set off this fear of demassification, as audiences become more and more fragmented. The political and social implications of mass audiences and mass media go beyond the scope

27、 of this paper, but the current uneasiness and discussion over the terms themselves seem to indicate that the old idea of the mass media has reached its limit (Schudson, 1992; Warner, 1992). Critical researchers have long questioned the assumptions implicit in traditional media effects definitions,

28、looking instead to the social, economic, and historical contexts that gave rise to institutional conceptions of media. Such analysis, Fejes (1984) notes, can lead to another unquestioning set of assumptions about the medias ability to affect audiences. As Ang (1991) has pointed out, abandoning the i

29、dea of the mass media and their audiences impedes an investigation of media institutions power to create messages that are consumed by real people. If the category of mass medium becomes too fuzzy to define, traditional effects researchers will be left without dependent variables, and critical schol

30、ars will have no means of discussing issues of social and political power. A new communication technology such as the Internet allows scholars to rethink, rather than abandon, definitions and categories. When the Internet is conceptualized as a mass medium, what becomes clear is that neither mass no

31、r medium can be precisely defined for all situations, but instead must be continually rearticulated depending on the situation. The Internet is a multifaceted mass medium, that is, it contains many different configurations of communication. Its varied forms show the connection between interpersonal

32、and mass communication that has been an object of study since the two-step flow associated the two (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). Chaffee and Mutz (1988) have called for an exploration of this relationship that begins with a theory that spells out what effects are of interest, and what aspe

33、cts of communication might produce them (p. 39). The Internet offers a chance to develop and to refine that theory. How does it do this? Through its very nature. The Internet plays with the source-message-receiver features of the traditional mass communication model, sometimes putting them into traditional patterns, sometimes putting th