the idea of opinion as social control also influenced several major theories of media effect, including Noelle-Neumann’s own “spiral of silence” theory, as well as Gerbner’s “cultivation” theory (more on these later as well). On this darker view of opinion, media messages come to be seen as possibly sinister forces that can “manufacture” opinion in directions sought by elites. Because people have an instinctual need to know what others think about their own opinions, and because media provide the main vehicle for disseminating information about the popularity of opinions, media play an outsize role in drawing support for what eventually become the majoritarian positions. Public susceptibility to media messages, driven by an a-rational need to conform, becomes another important part of the media effects picture, especially in relation to phenomena such as propaganda.
“Mass” communication
While the study of public opinion was and is contained in a field all its own, it has been heavily influenced by the development of media. Speier (1950) noted:
the history of public opinion has been written primarily with reference to channels of communication, e.g., the marketplace in ancient Greece; the theater in Imperial Rome; the sermons, letters, ballads and travels in the Middle Ages; pamphlets, newspapers, books and lectures, telegraph, radio and film in modern times. (pp. 379–80)
Without sufficient means to carry and represent the views of the people, there is no medium within which opinion can form, as it requires a dynamic and reciprocal process of the creation and sharing of views. Even wearing its darker vestments of social control, opinion adapts to the media of its time. Thus, media channels make an important difference in terms of how opinion is expressed; media matters in the control of opinion as well. It was the evolution of media toward a mass characteristic that made a most important difference for what we now call media effects research.
The “mass,” in sociology, is a very large, heterogeneous social grouping. In the latter half of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, it was seen as the dominant social form that the world was emerging into, as powerful forces such as industrialization and urbanization disrupted traditional forms of social organization (Lowery & DeFleur, 1995). In a mass, individual identities and characteristics are subsumed to a larger singular cultural identity. Culture and cultural products are aimed at these large social groupings, with mass culture stereotypically seen as a “lower” or more debased form. The mass encourages cultural producers to appeal to “lowest common denominator” audiences, with commercial motives amplifying tendencies toward lowering cultural standards.
What were the media that created and served this mass? Beginning with the development of mass newspapers in the 1830s, media technology evolved very quickly, including the development of telegraph, telephone, photography, recorded sound, and film, all in a period of less than 100 years. Each new medium brought exciting and radically new possibilities for knowing about the world. Also, they brought social change that was usually poorly understood in terms of its potential negative consequences.
Media that could address the mass meant the construction of a characteristically mass audience (Butsch, 2000). Sensing the eventual predominance of the mass audience, around the turn of the twentieth century, sociologist Gustav Le Bon had developed the idea that “crowds” could be analyzed as a unit, leading to notions that public opinion, though composed of many individual opinions, ironically acts with something like an intentional and centrifugal force, one that was changing the governance of nations:
the voice of the masses has become preponderant. It is this voice that dictates their conduct to kings, whose endeavor is to take note of its utterances. The destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes. (Le Bon, 1952 [1896], p. 16)
These social groupings were seen as having an intentionality just like that of an individual. Opinion began to be elevated from something that an individual person might have to something a mass could develop as its own volitional characteristic. Masses could “think,” masses could “act,” masses could render judgments, and the judgments of the mass were more frequently becoming paramount in twentieth-century politics.
Le Bon’s writings on the topic crystallized some of the feelings that were to galvanize media effects researchers. His conception of the crowd was based in what Freud would later call the “id.” “When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives. Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain” (1952 [1896], pp. 16–17). The crowd acts instinctually and irrationally, and not much can be expected from it in terms of explaining why it reacts in the way that it does. Despite the difficulty in explaining crowd behavior, the idea that mass media play an important causal role is not easily dismissed. Images, feelings, reactions: these are the stock-in-trade of the crowd, which can swing wildly from one pole to the next. Le Bon’s ideas had been formed by things that were starting to happen as early as the French Revolution, but it was the media developments of the twentieth century that allowed his work to have continued relevance.
Another facet of media effects thinking that Le Bon’s work predicted was the appeal of stories and narratives to the crowd. Crowds and masses seemed especially good at seizing a particular narrative, and then carrying out actions based on the moral of that story with much more zest than an individual could. Le Bon’s view of history is instructive:
[W]orks of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts, accompanied by explanations the result of reflection. To write such books is the most absolute waste of time. Had not the past left us its literary, artistic, and monumental works, we should know absolutely nothing in reality with regard to bygone times. … Our interest is to know what our great men were as they are presented by popular legend. It is legendary heroes, and not for a moment real heroes, who have impressed the minds of crowds.
Unfortunately, legends – even although they have been definitely put on record by books – have in themselves no stability. The imagination of the crowd continually transforms them as the result of the lapse of time … (Le Bon, 1952 [1896], p. 48)
Public consternation with the new powers of the mass – basically a crowd acting under the influence of coordinated media messages designed for and directed to that crowd – was an important factor that contributed to later research interest in media effects.
“A word has appeared”: Propaganda
Historical developments played a major role in how scholars would specifically conceptualize media effects. The period around World War I turned out to be crucial. In Europe, media were being used in new ways to create propaganda to support the war aims of either side. Newspapers and other print media such as posters developed very graphic depictions of each other as the enemy (British propaganda, for instance, referred to the Germans as the “Hun”), and these messages reached across the Atlantic as well. It was a major moment of reckoning for Americans with their still-developing mass media system. While every war had featured to some degree the effects and influences of communication, its role was greatly heightened in World War I, with newspapers actively playing a role in fomenting American involvements. Woodrow Wilson’s government used specific techniques of organized public communication to create support for US participation. After the war there was significant disappointment with the US role, and a sense that the country had been duped into something it might not have otherwise done given better information. Given that the war did not really produce any better outcome in Europe – things actually got worse – Americans were left wondering whether their participation had been worth it, or had they been fooled by the new mass messaging?
“Propaganda,” a term that had languished somewhat since its coinage by the Catholic Church in the
