"The Effects of Mass Communication"

Most humanists derive their images of mass communications less from direct experience than from media novels such as Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. From such a perspective, the central issue is the defects, not the effects, of mass communication. Their net effect, indeed, it is assumed, is to keep or render man defective by civilized standards.

According to Klapper's book, however, such surrealistic fiction is more strained than the truths of sociological observation will allow. This book summarizes and attempts to integrate into a valid and reliable theory more than 270 studies "of disciplined social research dealing with effects of mass communication in certain specific areas."

There are chapters on the author's own "phenomenistic" (essentially multiple causation) approach; on reinforcement, minor change and related phenomena; on the creation of opinion on new issues; on conversion; on the roles different media and audience images of them play; on the effects of crime and violence in the media; on the effects of escapist media material; on the effect of adult TV fare on child audiences (perhaps the freshest and most interesting); and on media attendance and audience passivity.

In general, Klapper reports that the chief effect of a generation of media research  is to displace the concept of hypodermic effect (single message, simple effect) with an "inexhaustible fount of variables" extremely basic generalizations on selective exposure, selective perception, selective retention and opinion leadership probably ought to be part of the mental equipment of every civilized person; they merit reading. The problems of vicarious violence, escapism and passivity are related enough to the literary experience to attract the curious.

But Klapper's frankness to admit the difficulty of long-range effects analysis, his explicit warning about the current "tendency to go overboard in blindly minimizing the effects and potentialities of mass communication," and his worried admission that what research there is probably applies within a "relatively stable social situation" and not to crucial issues at times of massive political upheaval leaves one with a lively sense of the limitations of this way of gauging media effects and defects.

If Nathanael West goes too far with too little fact, Joseph Klapper doesn't go far enough to clarify the necessary choices the new media have themselves imposed on us. Even a so-so novel, like Gerald Green's The Heartless Light (Scribner's, 1961) about press irresponsibility in a kidnapping, poses the moral and aesthetic alternatives more forcefully than this meticulous and completely responsible scientific performance. Perhaps the point is that being half sure about major issues is in the last analysis more important than being absolutely certain of a minor truth or of no truth at all.

"The Effects of Mass Communication" xviii, 302 pp. Free Press, 1960
Patrick D. Hazard, University of Hawaii