Glossary of concepts

Short, sourced definitions of the concepts used in the course, with the lessons where they appear.

administrative research — In Lazarsfeld’s 1941 distinction, communication research with empirical methods that serves the practical aims of a particular institution.
agenda-setting — The idea that the emphasis the news media give to issues influences how important the public considers those issues: the media shape not what people think, but what they think about.
AGIL scheme — Parsons’s scheme of the four requirements a system must meet to persist: adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency (pattern maintenance).
agitprop — A contraction of “agitation and propaganda”: the ideological publicity and education body set up by the Soviet Communist Party in 1920, and later any cultural product with a political purpose.
anomie — In Durkheim, a state of disorder in which traditional rules have lost their authority and desires become unlimited; the cause of one type of suicide in his study.
atomisation — The assumption that individuals are cut off from intermediate ties such as family, neighbourhood and association and isolated from one another; the base of mass-society theory and its most criticised claim.
atrocity propaganda — A method of arousing hostility and anger through stories of the enemy’s atrocities, some true, some invented or unverifiable.
broadcasting — Sending the same programme from a centre to a large number of receivers at the same time; the basic form of radio and television.
Chicago School — The community of sociologists at the University of Chicago, roughly 1915–1935, who studied the city, migration and social order through fieldwork; it treats communication as constitutive of society.
circular model (Osgood–Schramm) — The textbook name for the model in which each participant both encodes, decodes and interprets and the message travels back and forth; Schramm’s texts credit the idea to Osgood.
climate of opinion — The perception of which opinion is widespread, rising or in favour around one on an issue. In the spiral of silence, this perception rather than the real distribution shapes behaviour.
Committee on Public Information (Creel Committee) — The first American war propaganda and information agency, set up on 13 April 1917 under George Creel; it was abolished in 1919.
communication — The process in which people try to convey or share meaning through symbols. It has no single definition: some definitions stress the transmission of a message, others the building of shared meaning.
content analysis — A method that sorts the manifest content of media messages into categories and counts them, using a codebook and coders; it asks messages, not people.
correlation and causation — Two things varying together (correlation) does not show that one causes the other; reverse direction, a third variable and time order must be considered.
critical research — In Lazarsfeld’s 1941 distinction, communication research that questions, on the basis of values, the media’s general role in society and the problems beneath it.
crowd psychology — The idea that people who come together acquire new characteristics and become open to suggestion and contagion; made famous by Le Bon (1895), later criticised by social-identity approaches.
cultivation theory — Gerbner’s theory that heavy television viewers’ perception of social reality is closer to the recurring messages of the on-screen world than that of similar light viewers; it sees the effect as accumulation spread over years.
Cultural Indicators Project — A long-running research programme that George Gerbner started in the late 1960s, monitoring television content over the years and combining it with viewer surveys; the framework of cultivation theory.
definition of the situation — People act according to how they define a situation; in Thomas’s famous sentence, situations defined as real are real in their consequences.
dramaturgy — Goffman’s approach that analyses everyday encounters in the language of theatre: front stage, back stage and impression management.
dysfunction — In Merton’s terms, observed consequences that lessen a system’s adjustment or persistence.
effect size — A number showing how large a difference or relationship is (d, r and the like); statistical significance only tells whether it could be chance.
entropy — Shannon’s measure of information: the number, in bits, that shows how much freedom of choice a source has among possible messages.
experiment (research method) — A method in which the researcher changes a condition and randomly assigns participants to groups to test the cause of a difference; strong internal validity, external validity to be questioned separately.
falsifiability — That a theory could turn out incompatible with some possible observation; for Popper, the criterion separating scientific from non-scientific theory.
fear of isolation — Fear of being excluded, of falling out of one’s surroundings’ favour. In the spiral of silence, the engine that drives people to probe the climate of opinion and to fall silent when they sense they are in the minority.
fear of mass culture — The worry that culture, shaped by numbers and the average, will become shallow, that elite standards will collapse, or that the masses will be distracted and numbed.
feedback — Information that returns to the sender from the receiver (or from a person’s own message); it lets the sender learn how the message was received and adjust it.
field of experience — The area where two participants’ accumulated experiences overlap: communication is easy only there. In textbooks, the name for Schramm’s two circles.
gatekeeping — The selection process that determines whether a story or piece of information passes through a media channel; the first link in the formation of the media agenda.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft — Tönnies’s two ideal types of association, based on two kinds of will (natural will and rational will): community and society.
generalized other — Mead’s concept: the standpoint of the organised community or social group that gives the individual a unity of self; the individual internalises it in organised games and social participation.
Gerbner’s general model of communication — George Gerbner’s 1956 model draws communication as a chain of perception, production and perception: someone perceives an event, produces a message with some means, and the message is perceived by someone else.
hard core — The minority that is not caught in the spiral and goes on defending its opinion, accepting exclusion (or because it is already excluded). Noelle-Neumann adds the “avant-garde” beside it.
heavy viewers — The upper end of the grouping by amount of television viewing in cultivation research; on the other side of the comparison are light viewers (those who watch little).
human ecology — Applying to human relations the analysis used for plant and animal communities; competition creates order and the cultural order limits that competition (Park).
hypodermic needle (magic bullet) model — The textbook story that mass media deliver messages directly and uniformly to a passive, isolated audience, like an injection or a bullet that hits its target; according to historians, a label added later.
ideal type — In Weber, an analytical construct built by deliberately one-sided accentuation of one or more aspects of reality; a yardstick, not a perfect example.
immigrant press — Newspapers and magazines that immigrants publish in their own languages; for Park, depending on content, it can either speed up or slow down assimilation.
Jakobson’s functions of language — According to Roman Jakobson a verbal message has six functions: referential, emotive, conative, poetic, phatic and metalingual. Each function is oriented to one factor of communication; one of them is usually dominant.
Lasswell’s formula — A way of describing an act of communication through five questions: who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect? Each question corresponds to a field of research.
linear transmission model — An approach that sees communication as a one-way transfer of a message from sender to receiver. Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver count as its first examples; it is most often criticised as having “no feedback, no context, no meaning”.
looking-glass self — Cooley’s concept: a person builds a sense of self through the judgment they imagine others hold of them; the imagined judgment matters more than the mirror in the comparison.
mainstreaming — The way heavy television viewing erodes differences in outlook that stem from factors such as age, education and political orientation and brings people closer to a common “television mainstream”.
Maletzke’s field schema — Gerhard Maletzke’s 1963 model shows mass communication as a “field” of communicator, statement, medium and recipient; the images the two sides hold, the pressure from the medium and the social environment are parts of that field.
manifest and latent functions — Merton’s distinction: a manifest function is an intended consequence that contributes to a system’s adjustment; a latent function is a consequence of the same kind that is unintended and unrecognised.
manufacture of consent — The phrase Lippmann used in 1922: public opinion can be shaped by an analysis-based art of “creating consent”. Bernays spoke of the “engineering of consent” in 1947; Herman and Chomsky made the phrase a book title in 1988.
mass communication — A form of communication in which messages reach a dispersed audience through technical means, publicly, indirectly and one-way; the communicator is usually an institution.
mass media — Print, electronic and digital channels that carry the same message at the same time to large numbers of people who do not know one another and are scattered.
mass society — A family of ideas holding that growth in scale dissolves community and intermediate-group ties, that elites become open to mass pressure and masses to elite mobilisation, and that the media manage this arena; not one single theory.
mean world syndrome — Heavy television viewers seeing the world as more dangerous, insecure and mean than it really is; the best-known concept of Gerbner’s cultivation work.
media agenda — The ordering of issues by importance in newspapers, bulletins and websites: which issue gets how much space, airtime and priority.
media-centric — A view that grants media and communication autonomy and influence of their own and treats media as a driver of social change (McQuail).
message system analysis — The second prong of Cultural Indicators: systematically counting and tracking recurring patterns in media content (who appears, what they do, what they do to whom).
meta-analysis — A method that statistically combines the effect sizes of similar studies to obtain a common estimate and the reasons for differences; sensitive to the file-drawer problem and measurement error.
metacommunication — Communication about communication: cues about how a message is to be understood and how the two parties relate. For Watzlawick, the relationship aspect of communication classifies its content aspect.
micro–macro divide — A distinction in sociology by the scale of the phenomenon studied: the macro level covers social systems and institutional structures, the micro level interpersonal and interactional processes.
middle-range theory — A testable theory of a delimited domain, standing between small working hypotheses and large theories that aim to explain everything at once.
modernity — In this lesson: the social life of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transformation in which old bonds dissolved, cities grew and the division of labour and calculability spread; the shared background of the classical theorists.
movable type — Making each character a separate piece so that it can be set into a page, printed and then reused; developed in clay, wood and metal in different parts of the world.
need for orientation — A concept that predicts a person’s wish to turn to the news media on an issue: the combination of personal relevance and uncertainty. It explains in whom agenda-setting will be stronger.
Newcomb’s ABX model — Theodore Newcomb’s 1953 model: two persons (A, B) orient simultaneously toward an object (X) and toward each other; when their views diverge, a strain toward symmetry arises.
news agency — An organization that gathers news and sells it to many newspapers and broadcasters; with the telegraph it sped up the turning of news into a commercial product in the 19th century.
news as a form of knowledge — Park’s 1940 idea: on the continuum formed by James’s acquaintance-with and knowledge-about, news is a distinctive kind of knowledge, transient and talk-provoking.
noise — In Shannon’s diagram, everything added to the signal during transmission that the source did not intend (static, distortion, errors). Weaver also proposed “semantic noise”, which distorts meaning.
nonverbal communication — Communication through everything other than words, such as facial expression, gesture, posture, tone of voice and distance; it works together with verbal communication and often complements it.
paradigm — In Kuhn, the exemplary achievements a scientific community shares, together with the beliefs, values and tools that go with them; in communication studies often used loosely for a “dominant approach”.
penny press — A type of newspaper that appeared in American cities in the 1830s: sold on the street for one cent, financed by advertising and turning to local and human-interest news.
perception in communication (Gerbner) — In Gerbner’s model communication begins with the perception of an event: the perceiver sees not the whole event but a view (E1) limited by selectivity, context and availability.
powerful effects assumption — The belief that media can shape public opinion, attitudes and behaviour strongly; it recurs in different forms from the propaganda worry of the 1920s–30s to Noelle-Neumann (1973) and mid-range theories, and is not one single theory.
priming — An issue or area that stands out in the media becoming the yardstick people use when judging a leader or an event.
propaganda — An organised effort to make a view, belief or attitude accepted by the masses through symbols, stories, news and images. The word comes from the name of a church body founded in 1622; it acquired its negative charge after the First World War.
pseudo-environment — Lippmann’s term: the simplified representation that comes between people and the real environment, and to which behaviour actually responds. It does not mean a lie; its consequences appear in the real environment.
public agenda — The ranking of the issues that the public (or a sample) considers important; usually measured by survey.
public opinion — In the spiral of silence, public opinion is not a voting total but a means of social control: the opinions a person can express openly without being excluded, or must openly show in order not to be excluded.
public relations — The profession of managing an organisation’s, idea’s or group’s relations with the public; described as “public relations counsel” in Bernays’s 1928 book.
public versus crowd — Tarde’s distinction: a crowd is a gathering of bodies in which feeling spreads by contact; a public is physically dispersed, held together mentally, and formed through the newspaper.
qualitative research — A family of methods using interviews, focus groups, observation and text reading to understand how people make sense of the world; it produces interpretation rather than numbers.
quasi-statistical sense — According to Noelle-Neumann, an almost statistician-like “sixth sense” that lets people, without running a poll, sense which opinion is rising and which is declining around them.
rationalization — In Weber, the progressive making of the world calculable and predictable; associated with disenchantment and the image of the “steel-hard shell” (iron cage).
reliability — The degree to which a measurement gives the same result when repeated under the same conditions; consistency. Being consistent is not the same as being right.
replication crisis — The finding that many published results do not hold up when studies are repeated, and the debate about causes such as flexible analysis and selective reporting.
resonance — When everyday life experience and television messages overlap, the cultivation effect gets a “double dose” and becomes stronger.
Riley and Riley model — The 1959 approach of John W. Riley and Matilda White Riley: sender and receiver sit inside primary and secondary groups and a wider social structure; communication is a social and institutional activity.
ritual view — The view that sees communication less as carrying information and more as sharing, participation and community, focused on representing and maintaining shared beliefs. It is the view James W. Carey proposed against the transmission view.
salience — How far an issue, person or attribute stands out on an agenda; that is, its perceived importance. In agenda-setting this is what is transferred from the media to the public.
sampling — Choosing the part you actually measure (the sample) from the whole you want to talk about (the population); representativeness depends on how the sample was selected, not on how large it is.
Schramm’s model — Wilbur Schramm’s model in the 1954 chapter “How Communication Works”: Shannon’s engineering chain, two people’s circles of experience, everyone both encoding and decoding, and feedback.
second-level agenda-setting — The idea that the media transfer to the public not only which issues, but also which attributes of issues or persons stand out.
Shannon–Weaver model — An engineering theory that draws a communication system as source, transmitter, channel, receiver and destination (plus a noise source) and focuses on measuring how accurately a message is carried.
SMCR model (Berlo) — The textbook short name for David Berlo’s 1960 model: source, message, channel, receiver, and the factors in each that determine the outcome.
social facts — In Durkheim, ways of acting, thinking and feeling that exist outside the individual and exert pressure on him, such as language, monetary systems, law and suicide rates.
social laboratory — Seeing the city as the place where social processes can be observed enlarged and visible (Park, 1915); it does not mean a controlled experimental room.
society-centric — A view that sees the media mainly as a reflection of political and economic forces and media theory as a special application of broader social theory (McQuail).
sociology — The scientific study of society; the name comes from the word “sociologie” that Comte presented as a new term in a footnote in 1839.
solidarity (mechanical and organic) — In Durkheim, the bond that holds society together; mechanical solidarity rests on likeness, organic solidarity on the interdependence of specialised parts.
spiral of silence — People sense which opinion is gaining strength around them; those left in the minority fall silent out of fear of isolation, which makes their opinion look weaker than it is, and the process accelerates like a spiral. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s theory.
stereotype — The term Lippmann popularised in its social-psychological sense: the ready-made pattern, supplied by culture, that we have in mind before we know the complicated world. We define first and see afterwards.
structural functionalism — A macro-level approach in sociology that sees society as a system of interdependent parts and explains an institution or practice by what it contributes to the whole’s continuation.
suggestibility — A person’s tendency to accept incoming information as true without testing it enough. Cantril explained it in his Mars study through “standards of judgment” and “checking up”; the concept reaches back to the suggestion doctrine of the early twentieth century.
survey research — A family of methods that puts the same questions to a sample drawn from a population and measures the distribution of opinions, attitudes and reported behaviour; cross-sectional or panel.
symbolic interactionism — A micro-level approach in sociology that sees society as a process people continually build in interaction through shared meanings; Blumer gave it its name in 1937.
the Lippmann–Dewey debate — The name given in the 1980s to the disagreement between Lippmann’s 1922–25 books and Dewey’s 1927 book. According to historians there was no back-and-forth debate in the 1920s; the “debate” was constructed afterwards.
the metropolis and mental life — Simmel’s 1903 thesis that the metropolis, through its rapid flow of impressions, intensifies nervous life and gives rise to a blasé and a reserved attitude.
the phantom public — Lippmann’s claim in his 1925 book: the idea of a public that steers the course of events is an abstraction; the real public is a changing set of people who join an affair only by taking sides with or against the actors.
the propagandist as technician — This lesson’s shorthand, not Lasswell’s term: the view in his 1927 book of propaganda as a professionalising field of expertise that studies the ‘technique’ of managing opinion through significant symbols.
the six factors of verbal communication — According to Jakobson every act of verbal communication consists of six factors: addresser, addressee, message, context, contact (channel) and code. Each factor determines a different function of language.
the three social functions of communication — The three jobs communication does for society, according to Lasswell: surveillance of the environment, correlating the parts of society in their response, and transmitting the social heritage across generations.
theory — A systematic set of ideas that helps make sense of a phenomenon, explain it, predict a consequence and guide action; in the strict sense, connected propositions from which observed regularities can be derived.
Thomas theorem — If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences (W. I. and D. S. Thomas, 1928); the belief need not be true.
transmission view — The view that sees communication as the sending of messages over distance, the carrying of information from one place to another. One of the two views that Carey contrasts with each other.
tyranny of the majority — In Tocqueville, the moral power of the majority in democracies, which ends discussion once it has decided and silences independent thought.
urbanism — For Louis Wirth, the distinctive way of life and pattern of behaviour that arises from the settlement of a large, dense, permanent and socially heterogeneous population (1938).
validity — The degree to which a measurement really measures what it is meant to measure; internal validity looks at the cause of a difference, external validity at whether findings extend to other contexts.
Verstehen (interpretive understanding) — In Weber, grasping the subjective meaning of action by interpretation; not empathy or intuition but a method combined with causal explanation.
Weaver’s three levels — Three layers of communication problems: A technical (how accurately are symbols transmitted), B semantic (how well does meaning arrive), C effectiveness (how far does received meaning affect conduct).
Westley–MacLean model — Westley and MacLean’s 1955–57 model: to Newcomb’s A–B–X it adds a channel role that selects on the receiver’s behalf (C, the gatekeeper) and three feedback lines.
white, grey and black propaganda — A classification of propaganda by how its source is presented: the source is open (white), hidden or unclear (grey), or falsely shown (black).