Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Discipline in Crisis? The Shifting Paradigm of Mass Communication Research

Annie Lang
Department of Telecommunications and Program in Cognitive Science, Institute for Communication Research, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

This article analyzes the Kuhnian paradigmatic status in the eld of mass communication. It is suggested that the elds rst paradigm, Media Effects, is in a state of crisis rather than a preparadigmatic state or a state of normal science. Finally, this article proposes a description of the current paradigm-in-crisis, suggests ways in which conceptions of the fundamental nature of what we are studying may be shifting, and proposes the elements of a new paradigm which may be emerging in the eld. doi:10.1111/comt.12000

According to Kuhn (1996), without a paradigm, one can do science but one cannot create science. This is because, without a paradigm, one is merely looking around (p. 96) to see what can be seen. The observer within a paradigm, on the other hand, is looking, with difculty, for something they expect to see; generally, something that has not yet been observed or demonstrated. In a similar vein, Charles Darwin wrote (Shermer, 2002), How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! Kuhns concept of paradigms and their purpose, as laid out in the Structure of Scientic Revolutions, has had an enormous impact on how we think about disciplines, science, and the growth of knowledge. This article makes an attempt to very closely follow Kuhns denition, with all its qualications, of paradigm, and to apply that close reading to the recent history of the eld of mass communication in an attempt to answer the question: What is the dominant paradigm of mass communication research and is that paradigm in crisis? Many other writers have asked the question, does the eld of communication, or the more restricted eld of mass communication, have a paradigm. Different answers have been offered, most notably in two fairly well-known editions of the Journal of Communication (1983, 1993), which looked at the philosophical trials and tribulations of the eld. One often cited article by Potter (1993) suggested that the eld of communication not only did not have a paradigm but also was prescientic. However, I believe that most of these articles, in their analyses, did not include all three of the basic things, which Kuhn says a paradigm provides to the scientist: (a) an understanding of the fundamental nature of the thing which he or she is studying; (b) based on that fundamental nature, scientists devise novel, particular, or specic
Corresponding author: Annie Lang; e-mail: anlang@indiana.edu
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ways of observing the world; and (c) as a result of the rst two, those who share the paradigm also share agreement on what are the primary questions that should be asked about the phenomenon. Looking back, at the last 50 or so years of mass communication research, it is interesting to ask ourselves if we have agreement on these three things. The answers to those questions, it seems to me, will provide an answer to the question of whether or not we have or have had a paradigm. Should the answer to that question prove to be yes, it may be possible to explicate what the paradigm is. Should we succeed in successfully explicating that paradigm, we could then ask the question whether we have been successful in answering our agreed-upon questions, and if not, whether our lack of success is a result of counterinstances in the data or what Kuhn calls anomalous results. According to Kuhn, counterinstances are provided by data which, while not matching theoretical expectations, or conrming theoretical predictions, are not in themselves of sufcient novelty, or surprising enough to cause us to question our assumptions about the fundamental nature of what we are studying. Anomalous data, on the other hand, call into question the fundamental assumptions of the paradigm. They do this either because, given our paradigmatic assumptions, it is simply impossible that what we are seeing has occurred, or, because, despite the best science we can produce, work within the paradigm theory is failing to solve the puzzles proposed by our paradigm. When this occurs, we may have a great deal of disagreement in the eld over whether we are making any kind of progress toward answering fundamental questions, and indeed, whether our fundamental questions are all that fundamental. Signs of this sort may indicate what Kuhn calls a eld in crisis, which means that, while there is a paradigm, it is not successfully moving the enterprise of science forward, either because it is failing to match observations of the world and/or it is failing to increase our understanding of that world. Kuhn gives excellent examples of both types of crises. The rst he exemplies by the discovery of x-rayswhich, although not precisely disallowed, were not conceived of within the paradigm. The subsequent work to understand and control them led to a fundamental shift in our understanding of light. The second type of crisis might best be illustrated by the comparison between Ptolemaic astronomy and Copernican astronomy. At the time of Copernicus, the Ptolemaic notion of astronomy had achieved an incredible complexity; indeed, the level of complexity had increased much faster than its level of explanation, which indeed might perhaps have been decreasing. Thus, the growth of knowledge was not matching the growth in complexity and precision of the science. Increasing amounts of precision and data led, not to an improved match between the paradigm and the world, but rather to an enormous amount of adjusting that had to be done to make the data t within the conceptions that guided its gathering resulting in a paradigm in crisis. This article suggests that the current state of mass communication research bears a distinct resemblance to what Kuhn described as a state of crisis, rather than a preparadigmatic state or a state of normal science. Finally, this article proposes a description of the current paradigm-in-crisis, suggest ways in which conceptions of
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the fundamental nature of what we are study may be shifting, and proposes the elements of a new paradigm which may be emerging in the eld.
In search of our paradigm

Many people have tried to nd a paradigm in communication research and have come to many different conclusions as to whether or not one exists. I recognize up front the audacity of trying to do what much better scholars than I have failed to do in the past. However, perhaps the advantage of a longer view of the eld will provide more data, and thereby make the task easier. How do we go about looking for a paradigm? Here let me rely on Kuhn to guide the way. First, from Kuhn we learn that a paradigm must be a scientic achievement of such extreme excellence, that it attracts followers who then adopt its fundamental assumptions, methods, and questions. Second, Kuhn suggests that we will nd the paradigm in our textbooks. He says that textbooks do not accurately reect the history of our eld, but rather reect history as rewritten from the perspective of the new paradigm. In this rewritten history, we nd both the achievements which led to the foundation of the paradigm, the assumptions of the paradigm which primarily include the fundamental nature of what we are studying, the primary questions requiring answer, and the methods we should use to answer these agreed-upon questions. We all know the received history of our eld and that many excellent articles have been written telling us it is incorrect (Delia, 1987; Wartella & Reeves, 1985). The very fact that our received history does not match the history of our eld, suggests that it is a history written by the victorious. Here, I would like to take a moment to suggest that mass communication and interpersonal communication, at least over the last 50 years, do indeed represent different disciplines. A great deal of data supports this contention, including the fact that they are generally located in separate departments, with the interpersonal scholars often located in departments of speech communication or rhetoric, sometimes in English, and at other times in departments called human communication. On the other hand, mass communication departments are often located in schools of journalism, are often associated with the professions, and often have a variety of professional names, in addition to being called mass communication. In this essay, I deal with the paradigm of mass communication and discuss whether that paradigm is shifting. To provide a bit of foreshadowing, I state here that I think in the new paradigm the difference between mass and interpersonal communication will largely disappear; whether disciplinary boundaries will follow that disappearance or not is uncertain. So what are the textbooks of mass communication? There are many, but I would suggest that a predominance of the current generation of midcareer to senior scholars were partially indoctrinated by Lowery and DeFleurs Milestones of Mass Communication Research (Lowery & DeFleur, 1983, 1988, 1995). Everett Rogers, in his forward to the third edition of this textbook, suggests that these milestones, in particular the early milestones, provided the basic framework for our
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eld, and that the framework included three things: rst, a conception of mediated communications as agents for change in the society (i.e., the fundamental nature of mass communication); second, a focus on effects (i.e., general agreement on the questions to be asked); and third, social scientic, primarily survey, and methodology (i.e., acceptable methods). Let me elaborate a bit on these points. First, Rogers argues that our eld has a basic belief in technological determinism, a conceptualization of technology as an agent for change in society, making this a fundamental assumption of mass communication research. Second, from these early studies we got a focus on the effects of mass communication. If our focus is on effects, this implies (in concert with a belief in change) a view of humans and societies as internally stable and even resistant to change. I would argue that this implies that a fundamental assumption in the current paradigm of mass communication research is that society and people are, by nature, stable. In other words, people and societies have an equilibrium at which they function most efciently, external agents of change serve to disequilibrate the human, or the society, and bring it to a new state of equilibrium and mass communication is such an agent. Finally, Rogers suggests that, in particular, the groundbreaking studies of Lazersfeld (perhaps this is our paradigmatic achievement ) gave to the eld the methodology of social science, and in particular the methodology of survey research. If we review the table of contents of the Milestones, we see that the titles of the chapters reect this preoccupation with change and effects even though in many cases the studies themselves do not. The Payne Fund studies, a group of investigations carried out in the late 1920s to describe and investigate the then new medium of lm, provide an excellent example of how history has been rewritten to match the dominant paradigm. The studies themselves were quite varied in their methodological and theoretical perspectives, but in the textbook they are described simply as research on the effects of movies on children. Chapter 3 of Milestones, focusing on the response to the War of the Worlds,1 is titled Radio Panics America, implying both a universal change response and a technological cause. Other effects of the media covered by these milestones include the ability of the media to change votes, the ability of the media to change how people gratify their fundamental needs, the ability of the media to change how people get information, the ability of the media to change peoples attitudes, the ability of the media to change what we think about, and the ability of the media to make us violent. Other textbooks clearly reect this orientation; Glenn Sparks, in his textbook Media Effects Research (Sparks, 2002) offers a very similar history of mass communication. First, like Deeur, he discusses the milestones, suggesting that these are our paradigmatic achievements that gave us our fundamental beliefs, questions, and methods. He then offers us the standard received history of the eld: From these studies came the Magic Bullet Model, which was based on the notion that mediated or mass communication messages, which are essentially external to society and humans, have unitary and powerful effects on humans thoughts, emotions, and behavior. He suggests that this early theory of massive effects of
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mass communication (within a paradigm of media as agents of change and humans and societies as stable), was quickly shown, by research, to be untrue. Work by Lazersfeld, Berelson, and others demonstrated that effects of media were not massive and were not undifferentiated leading us to the second major approach to mass communication effects, the limited effects model. Here, the idea was that some people were affected some of the time, by some media, in some situations. This led to the development of theories of the midrange. These theories were designed to ask, for specic media and specic message types, whose behavior was changed in what situation. Lack of an ability to nd more than minimal behavioral change as a result of mass media exposure led the eld to expand its dependent variables from behavior to include cognitive and affective changes among the effects of mass communication. Along with this expansion of possible dependent variables came an explosion of new media, which allowed us to take this perspective and apply it to one new medium after another, in one new social situation after another, with one new group of people after another. The resulting profusion of novel research may have hidden, to some extent, the dearth of actual progress being made by the eld as we continued to conceptualize media and mediated messages as essentially external to people and their social milieus and functioning to change those people and those milieus. Virtually all current textbooks of mass communication provide this same history of mass communication research and their chapter headings reect a focus on what types of content, in what type of medium, affect which people, in what situations. This, I will argue, is the dominant paradigm of mass communication research. Our fundamental conception of mass communication is as an agent of change, external to people and their immediate social environments. Mass media primarily function to disrupt and change both the environment and the person. Thus, our agreed upon primary goals and questions are to demonstrate the effects of mass communication, and, if possible explain how they come about. In general, the eld includes a normative sense, that the effects of mass communication are bad. And that maintaining the stable social system and the stable human being are anticipated benets of successful mass communication research. That is, if we successfully explain how mass communication changes people and societies, we will be able to make people media literate, so that they can resist this change. So, how are we doing? I would argue that like other elds before us functioning under wrong paradigms, we have made remarkably little progress in answering our questions about how mass communication affects people and societies. We have identied a number of small effects, which we glorify with the name theories, and we have demonstrated that they occur over and over and over again, in various situations and with various groups. We have made very little progress in explaining how they occur and in developing interventions, which prevent their occurrence (suggesting that our understanding is at best inadequate and more likely wrong). Similarly, these midrange theories continually increase in complexity without increasing in explanatory power or adding much to generalizable knowledge.
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For example, and I do not use this theory as my example because it is different from any of our other theories, but merely because it provides an excellent example of increased complexity with little increase in knowledge, take agenda setting. Every scholar of mass communication who ever took a theory class learned the agendasetting theory. We all read the original article (Mccombs & Shaw, 1972), and then we all had the discussion of whether it was a theory or hypothesis. Generally, being cynical, skeptical, and brilliant graduate students we all decided that it was not a theory, it was simply a hypothesis. And indeed, the initial test was a simple and elegant test of a hypothesis. A modest survey was done coupled with a modest content analysis. A large and predicted correlation was shown between the topics thought to be important among the survey participants and the weight of coverage of those topics in the newspaper. From this, the conclusion was drawn that the media do not tell us what to think, but rather that they tell us what to think about. In other words, while the media may not actually be able to CHANGE our thinking, they are able to CHANGE the topics about which we think. I am arguing here that the very existence of this theory is the beginning of paradigmatic crisis in our eld. With that statement, that the media cannot affect our thinking, we relinquished the notion that the media actually inuence thinking. Perhaps we gave away the most important effect that the media could possibly have. And we accepted a much smaller effect that the media could tell us what was popular, and therefore what we would talk about, as a fundamental effect of mass communication. It was a modest study; it came to a modest conclusion, which I believe was the beginning of the end of the dominant paradigm. If you pick up a recent issue of almost any of our journals, youll nd an agenda-setting paper inside. And that paper will bear a fantastic resemblance, in terms of its conclusions, to the original modest paper. But the methodology, the analysis, and the statistics will bear no resemblance at all to that rst-rank order correlation. Instead we will see all kinds of models, all kinds of different ways of coding the agendas, all sorts of different agendas, political agendas, social agendas, etc. but in the end, we will be left with the same correlation between weight of media coverage and topics people think are interesting, with no more understanding of how that happens, then we had 40 years ago. The same is true for almost every area of mass communication effects. I believe, and Im certain that many of my readers will disagree, that almost the only thing we have learned after 60 years of mass communication effects research is that the weight of exposure to almost any specic medium or content inuences any given behavior, on average, very slightly. Our eld abounds with meta-analyses, most of which conclude that there are very small and weak effects of mass communication (say 3% of the variance in the studied behavior). This result is, of course, quite comforting for society because it means that we can ignore mass communication as a serious agent of social and behavioral change. It is, however, quite discomforting for scholars in the eld as it suggests they should get into another line of work. The other possibility, and the one that I prefer, is that we are simply missing the boat. I believe that the very strong movement in mass communications away from social science methodology and away from the study of effects, which began in the late
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1970s, and continues to this day, that is the move to critical and cultural approaches to communication, is a direct response to the failure of the dominant paradigm. It is the major sign of crisis in our eld and the most developed. Those who take this approach to media start from a completely different fundamental understanding of communication, and a fundamentally different set of questions. These scholars would no more ask if mass communication has effects than they would walk in front of a speeding train. They know that it does. Why? Because they look at the world and they see the world changing as a result of mass communication. However, they do not think that mass communication is external to the world. They do not think that cultures are fundamentally stable. They do not think that humans are fundamentally stable. Rather, they think that communication is a fundamental and natural thing that humans do. Communications within small groups and small social situations reect the thoughts and ideas of the people within those groups, and serve to help the group function. Interpersonal communication is a natural thing that humans do, they do it to achieve individual and social ends, and communications rise from within a group of people. Mass communication, on the other hand, is different. In this approach, mass communication is seen as arising not only from individuals but also from the institutions of power in the society. In other words, mass communication (at least until the last decade) was controlled by large companies; large companies are controlled by rich and inuential members of society; and therefore, the large companies controlled the expression, the thought, and the opinions expressed over mass media. Therefore, mass-mediated messages could be read as expressions of power in society, and, as attempts to change society, or mold society, into something which would help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Excellent discussions of these critiques of effects research can be read in Livingstone (1996) and Miller (2009). Note that this is fundamentally different in every way from the dominant paradigm. First, it does not assume that mass media are external to society (although they are external to individuals), it simply assumes that mass media are a tool of a small but powerful group in society. It does not assume that mass communication cannot change how people think or what they think about, or their behavior. Rather, it assumes that it can and does. Indeed, it is not necessary to prove that it does, rather this approach nds mass media effects to be self-evident. It rejects the social scientic approach, perhaps, primarily because it has completely failed to see the enormous power of mass communication by focusing on small, shortterm, measurable behavioral effects and its rejection of the entire notion that mass communication can inuence how we think. The dominant method is one of looking at the texts of mass communication in an attempt to demonstrate the goals of those in power and the methods they are using to keep the rest of us in line. Its tone is critical, and its methods are humanistic, not scientic. Indeed, they are humanistic, because communication is seen as fundamentally human, and something humans do naturally in order to mold their environment. The result of this movement away from the dominant paradigm has been the growth of a new discipline, something we might call communication and culture. As
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a discipline, it now bears no resemblance to the more professionally and scientically oriented discipline of mass communication. It is probably fair to say not only that it is a different discipline, but also that it has a different paradigm, and that it is fundamentally, at this time, nonscientic. So let us return to our social scientic view of mass communication. It is the 1980s, the dominant paradigm is one of effects, and the signs of crisis are showing. We dont think media have much effect on how we think. We have lost a fair number of scholars to a new discipline. We have a large body of research that tells us that mass communication has weak or no effects, despite the growing evidence of our eyes that mass communication has enormous effects on every aspect of social and human behavior. The next sign of crisis, I will argue, was a direct attack on the notion that mass communication does not tell us what to think. Here, we have the beginnings of what I will call cognitive or psychological approaches to how people process mediated messages. This group of people, rather than abandoning the social scientic approach, abandoned the notion that mass communication does not affect thinking. Instead, they suggested, that mass communication should not be dened in terms of technological determinism. They argued that professional and content distinctions, driven by the dominant paradigm, made no sense psychologically. Rather, one should consider mediated communications as psychologically relevant messages. This perspective, rst championed by Byron Reeves and Esther Thorson, suggested that people have evolutionarily old brains, which encounter mass-mediated messages in the same way that they encounter real messages, and that their automatic and reexive motivational, cognitive, and emotional responses to mediated messages do not differ, initially, from those they have to real messages. Indeed, initially, this approach was considered to be a friendly amendment to the dominant paradigm, as demonstrated by its appearance in the rst edition of Perspectives on Media Effects, (Bryant & Zillmann, 1986). Among the contentbased, technology-based, and effects-based chapters, we nd chapter 13 (perhaps an unlucky coincidence) called Attention to Television: Psychological Theories and Chronometric Measures. In this chapter, the authors (Reeves, Thorson, & Schleuder, 1986) argue that there is an absence of programmatic development in research (p. 251). They argue that this is because in order to answer our research questions we need to begin to study processes that are covert and that these questions require close examination of relevant psychological studies (p.251). These authors argue specically for understanding how mass-mediated messages are processed differently from interpersonal communication messages, if they are. And they argue that the time during which the message is processed, what they called intramessage processing, is as important, or even more important, than the simple number of times we are exposed to messages. I will argue, that this chapter fundamentally called into question the value of dominant mass communication research, and that fundamental threat to the dominant paradigm resulted in that chapter being absent from subsequent editions of the book, until it nally reappeared in 2010.
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During that time, however, research from the psychological perspective grew in frequency, scope, and explanatory power. Other signs of its growth include the commencement of a journal, Media Psychology, the appearance of text book titles which stress the importance of psychology, such as Richard Jackson Harriss A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication (Harris, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009), and a growing group of scholars, primarily young scholars, who have interdisciplinary training, and who approach questions of mass communication in a fundamentally different way from those still working in the dominant paradigm. What are the fundamental differences in the nature of mass communication, the methods, and the agreed upon questions that are seen in this group of scholars? First, let us consider the fundamental nature of communication. Recollect that I argued that the dominant effects paradigm conceptualizes communication as an external force for change in otherwise stable humans and societies. I also argued that the splinter group of communication and culture, now perhaps a discipline of their own, views mass communications as expressions of power operating on and within relatively malleable humans and social systems. As it has developed, I think it is safe to argue that this new and growing psychological group perceives communication as a natural evolutionary development which serves to promote the continued existence of the species and the individual as it attempts to adapt through change to an unpredictable and unstable environment. This sentence is fundamentally opposed to everything about the dominant paradigm. First, the environment and therefore societies are seen as changing continuously, over time. Second, humans are seen as adapting to those changes. In other words humans are born to adapt to the world in which they nd themselves, that is to say that humans are born to change. This is why the same baby, placed in any environment, will take on the culture and the norms of the environment in which you place it. The baby was born to adapt. We do not lose that ability to adapt as we age and grow. The loss of adaptability would doom us to early death in the face of change. Early death would, eventually, doom the species to extinction. All animals, in this perspective, are seen as adapting to the continuously changing environment. Some have fewer ways of adapting than others, and these are more impacted by sudden environmental change. Some animals, those with a very short life cycle, adapt genetically. For example the moths, in England, that were primarily white, so as not to stand out against the white cliffs of Dover. However, when the industrial revolution turned the cliffs grey, within a very short period of time, the moths were also grey. When the environmental movement cleaned up the cliffs, the moths became white again. Humans, however, have a very long life cycle. While we do adapt genetically, signicant genetic change in the species has not occurred for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, we adapt through genetic diversity across individuals and by using our giant frontal lobes, which allow us to exert a phenomenal amount of control on our surroundings and on each other. One of the ways in which we do that is by communicating. We did not develop communication because it is nonadaptive. We do not use communication to persuade, to inform, to make love, or to tell jokes because those activities are nonadaptive or because communication is not capable of inuencing those activities.
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Thus, like our colleagues in communication and culture, this splinter group believes that communication is fundamentally powerful and adaptive. However, unlike our colleagues in communication and culture, we believe that science can be used to understand how communication messages are processed, how that processing inuences what a person remembers and takes away from the message, and how they respond emotionally to the message, and that understanding this interaction thoroughly will allow us to nd the mechanisms and parameters which describe the ways that communication contributes to the organization of behavior. Thus, this new understanding of the fundamental nature of mass communication includes the notion that both interpersonal and mass communication are adaptive properties of human systems. Humans are motivated, cognitive systems embedded in social systems, both of which are continuously changing over time. Hence, the approach is one of dynamic systems whose properties can be understood, modeled, and used to predict future behavior. From this perspective, the whole notion of effects is ridiculous (see for example, Lang & Ewoldsen, 2010). An effect must have a start point, which is stable, and an end point, which is the change. The dynamic systems approach simply cannot accommodate this notion. Rather, change is. While the system may have states that are more stable and states that are less stable, it is, nonetheless, built to change, and it does change. Changes are the result of a combination of environmental pressures and stimuli, as well as internal forces such as development, education, and biological imperatives. Regardless of the circumstances and source of stimuli, the system is always changing. Our goal is to learn to model and understand that change. Our goal is to dene communication, not in terms of professions (journalism, advertising, public relations), not in terms of contents (violent, sexual, political, persuasive), and not in terms of medium of carriage (interpersonal, radio, movies, television, World Wide Web). Instead, we must redene communication in terms of its psychologically relevant characteristics. What are psychologically relevant characteristics? Within this approach, several have been suggested and investigated across media platforms including motion, size, light, color, discontinuous change, speed, and motivational relevance. It is not a complete list, but you can see the difference between these types of variable characteristics, which exist for all communication messages and for all vehicles of carriage, including interpersonal communication and other more prominent denitions of communication, which serve to separate communications and media into qualitatively different kinds and then explicate how those different kinds function to inuence change. This perspective, unlike the effects perspective held captive by midrange theorizing, seeks to develop, and indeed expects to develop a general theory of communicationone that will, eventually, be able to predict the humanmessage interaction, and to predict, what the message recipient will take away from that interaction as a function of the psychologically relevant characteristics of the message, and perhaps to make some predictions about how later behavioral decisions will be made as a result of those communications.
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It is interesting to note that one psychologically relevant variable that exists for all contents and media is weight of exposure. The frequency and duration with which a message is encountered is an extremely psychologically relevant aspect of any message. If, as animals in a dangerous environment, we failed to note the frequency with which predators appeared in this area as opposed to some other area, or failed to note the frequency with which food grew on this hill compared to that hill, we would not survive long. Indeed, current cognitive theories suggest that frequency counting is an automatic offshoot of neurological ring. We have a sense of how often we have encountered a thing in a place and over a lifetime which we gain without effort. As mentioned above, frequency of exposure is probably the most successful predictive variable in every mass communication effects theory. This may be because it is almost the only psychologically relevant variable that has been consistently studied in our eld. Every other psychologically relevant variable has lost its variableness in the current paradigm. What do I mean by lost its variableness? What I mean is that rather than keeping and studying what happens across the entire range of a psychologically relevant variable, we break them into categories and levels, and then use those categories to dene the specic medium, message, or person to whom our midrange theory applies. Thus, the psychologically relevant variables have been separated from their continuum and used, instead, to create kinds of media and messages to study, rather than manipulated across their range to understand interactive communication. For example, take motivational relevance, an extremely powerful adaptive psychological variable which is almost completely missing in our eld. Why? First, what do I mean by motivational relevance. From the evolutionary perspective, which is fundamental to this new approach to communication, motivational relevance, is the extent to which a given stimulus is a threat or an opportunity. Basic motivational threats include attack, predators, and other sorts of physical danger. Basic opportunities include food and sex. The ability to avoid threat and capitalize on opportunities increases the success of the individual and the survival of the species. For this reason, motivational systems designed by evolution to encourage defensive and approach behaviors are hardwired into our physical chassis and automatically and covertly guide our interactions with our environment, including our media environment. But in the typical paradigmatically driven effects study, motivational relevance is not a variable, it is a content type. Those who study violence are studying the type of content which contains primary motivational information about threat. It is a type of content which automatically activates the defensive motivational system, which has predictable, although not yet fully understood, effects on the processing and storage of information, and the usefulness of that information for later decision-making. However, by studying this type of content by itself, separated from other types of motivationally relevant content and from content which is not particularly motivationally relevant, we fail to learn the nature and extent of these inuences on human behavior. Also, from this new approach, we gain a conception of communication as an interaction between a message and a human embedded in an environment that occurs
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over time. Thus communication is not the message, and it is not what the human received, but rather it is the overtime interaction of the message, the human, and the environment. Our goal, as scientists, is to come to thoroughly understand that over time interaction. To understand things which happen automatically and reexively, to understand how individual differences inuence the outcome of automatic and reexive processes, to understand how information is selected from the environment (including the message) and stored, as a function of those psychologically relevant variables, and to understand how different types of environment alter the interaction. It is worth noting here that recent research in the eld, in particular research on new media, has focused on interactivity as a key variable. I would argue here, however, that they are wrong in suggesting that interactivity is an important variable. Rather interactivity is an important aspect of the fundamental nature of communication. Humans interact continuously with their environment, indeed when prevented from interacting (for example through sensory deprivation), they go mad. Once we understand that, then, we can look at how different types and forms of interaction, but not the absence of interaction, play a fundamental role in the dynamic system. To summarize, what is coming out of this new approach to studying mass communication is a fundamentally new conception of communication, a fundamentally new set of methods, which are primarily cognitive, mathematical, and experimental, and a new agreement on the fundamental questions of communication research. Things that were used to dene communication in the past (medium, goal of the communicator, and content) are variables in a new general theory of communication. Our primary question is not, is there an effect of communication? Indeed, to the extent that we can even talk about effects, in this new approach, they are continuous, and mass communication, like any other environmental stimulus, has the power to elicit them. Instead, our questions demand that we: (a) identify and understand the psychologically relevant features of all existing media and all media yet to be developed as they arise; (b) That we dene all the various contents of mediated and unmediated messages in terms of their psychological relevance, not in terms of their goals and content; (c) That as we identify these variables, we then learn how they inuence motivational, affective, and cognitive responses within the motivated cognitive information processing system that is a human being; and (d) That we explore how this interaction is inuenced by environment. We must understand how varying the motivational relevance, or the attention-eliciting structural features, or the pace at which the message is presented, or the environment in which it is perceived inuence what aspects of the message are selected for further processing, how well those aspects of the message are stored, and their accessibility, relevance, and inuence later in time when a person is making a decision about how to act. Coming into the new paradigm does not mean that we have to give up socially relevant questions about how specic types of content may inuence thoughts and behavior. Rather, it allows us to begin understanding the mechanisms by which the content in the mediated message is transferred into a persons memory and is made available to the person when they are undertaking an action. We are no longer
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limited, in this paradigm, to simple empirical observation. Our results do not have to be empirical generalizations. Instead, we ought, eventually, be able to predict based on psychologically relevant aspects of media, coupled with psychologically relevant individual differences, way more than 3% of the variance in real-time processing and, by examining psychologically relevant variables like frequency, intensity, and pattern of exposure, its impact on future behavior. Nor do we have to give up our interest in or focus on behavior. Rather, as we understand the interaction with the message, and begin to understand how the real time human-message interaction relates to the later availability of message information, we can begin to predict what kinds of productions will make what kinds of information more accessible, and more likely to be consulted by more people at the point of action. We can also begin to ask that question for different groups of people. Here again, however, the shift in the fundamental nature of the conceptual denition of communication will demand an accompanying change in our selection of individual differences. The individual difference variables of importance are not going to be the same individual differences that were relevant to the old paradigm. The vast majority of research in mass communication, under the effects paradigm, has focused on socially relevant and relatively stable individual differences such as income, education, gender, racemost of which are variables that contribute to our stability as individuals and our place in the stable society. Within this new paradigm, the individual differences of importance will be those that inuence psychological, emotional, and motivational responding. We have already seen some of these variables emerging in the eld such as need for cognition, emotional intelligence, and motivational reactivity. These variables will inuence the system both as a person is interacting with the message and later on when a person is preparing for related action. They are variables which inuence the likely patterns of stability and instability in the message/human/environment interaction. For this reason, these individual differences should rmly link the real-time embedded message interaction and the projected embedded actions. I have given short shrift to the change in methodology that I am suggesting comes with the new paradigm, perhaps because I think methodological shifts are so much more easily seen than shifts in fundamental assumptions. However, briey, I think that, as in the old paradigm, the methodological approach will continue to be social scientic, though perhaps with less emphasis on the social and more on the scientic. The data that we will want to collect will be collected with even more difcultly than the data collected in the old paradigm. If our goal is to study covert, reexive, and automatic processing we cannot ask our subjects what or how they think. The survey method, although it may help to suggest areas in which we might look for mechanisms of processing and change, cannot give us access to the mechanisms of processing, emotional responding, motivation, memory accessibility, etc. rather, we will need methods that can track covert, automatic, and reexive processes. Indeed, since the 1980s we have begun to seriously incorporate into our eld experimental methodologies borrowed from psychology, from cognitive science, and from
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psychophysiology. The use of these methods is growing, and their ability to tell us surprising things about how messages are processed has become almost accepted. However, future methodological innovations are likely to be even more difcult than those in the past. Redening communication as a fundamental and natural aspect of nested dynamic systems embedded in and adapting to an environment will require that we cease to pay mere lip service to the concept of time and that we absolutely accept that we must measure everything over time. Over-time measurement, however, will produce massive data sets that cannot easily be subjected to standard static statistical analyses. The future will likely demand an understanding of dynamic systems theory coupled with skills in building complex cognitive, emotional, and motivational models of the interaction of a message and the human who encounters it. (Our interpersonal colleagues may have an even more difcult task as they will need to model the interaction of two humans simultaneously producing, emitting, and processing messages.) The need for interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative teams is likely just beginning. The days when we did not need to learn to program or build models or have a laboratory, complete with technical support and complex machines that measure various types of covert responses, may be coming to an end. Indeed, this may be the biggest obstacle to progress in this new approach. Even now as young scholars in the new paradigm develop and try to publish sophisticated models of message/human interaction and later choice behavior, reviewers and editors are struggling with the complexity and difculty of the papers and expressing concern that communication journal audiences will not be able to understand nor be interested in this kind of research. So, where do we go from here? Only time will tell. However, I do not believe that the discipline can survive much longer as a science if we continue to have only one successful independent variable (i.e., weight of coverage) and one generalizable result (i.e., the media have very small, weak, but persistent effects on peoples behavior). I nd that state of affairs to be not only disheartening but absolutely inexplicable when I look out at the world around me. I see media inuencing peoples behavior everyplace I look. I see society changing fantastically as a function of media and media content. Like those who joined the ranks of the communication and culture discipline, I can no longer support the conclusions of my own paradigm nor can I see the sense or the worth of much of the research taking place under its (somewhat tattered) umbrella. Unlike them, however, I believe science can help us to understand the power of all messages in all media on all people in all contexts. We must have theories which easily embrace new media, rather than calling for new theory every time there is a new medium. I believe that if mass communication is to grow as a science we will have to embrace the difculties ahead of us. We must learn to understand communication as a fundamental, dynamic, natural aspect of human adaptation to the environment. We must understand mass communication as simply an extension of what humans do, although a very important one. We must redene media in terms of human-centric variables. We must understand how variations in message production inuence every aspect of human behavior. The future is scary but I believe it is also bright.
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Note
1 A radio adaptation of Orson Welless War of the Worlds was broadcast in 1938 in the United States. The broadcast reports an ongoing invasion from Mars. Many listeners thought the broadcast was real and ed their homes in panic.

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