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Abstract
The division of the communication discipline according to whether people communicate face-to-face or via a technological medium has shaped the field's development from the outset. The divide has been institutionalized over time in the structures of academic departments and schools, professional training and degrees, scholarly societies and publishing, and in the field's larger research agendas. However, critics inside and outside the field have long insisted that the differences between the two subfields actually obscure the shifting, contingent nature of communication in everyday experience, social formations, and culture. This paper traces efforts to theorize the intersection of interpersonal and media communication, and in particular the concept of mediation, from Lazarsfeld and Katz's two-step flow in the 1950s, to the challenge of digital media technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, to the rise of new media studies and digital culture scholarship from the 1990s onward.
Notes
An expanded version of this paper was presented at the October 2008 meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers in Copenhagen, Denmark, and is available from the author.
Several writers have noted the central role of the University of Chicago in the early development of the communication discipline (e.g., Carey Citation1989; Peters Citation1986; Rogers Citation1994). Wahl-Jorgenson Citation(2004) argues that the multidisciplinary Committee on Communication and Public Opinion (1942–45) and Committee on Communication (1947–60) at the University of Chicago should be considered the first formal programs of communication study in the US, preceding the establishment of programs at the University of Illinois (1948) and Stanford University (1955).
It should be noted that information theory itself has moved far beyond its origins in notions of signal and noise, randomness versus order, to incorporate concepts of indeterminacy, self-organization, chaos theory, and so on. An excellent review of these developments related to the social sciences is provided by Contractor Citation(1999).
Katz himself, of course, was a prominent early diffusion scholar (Coleman et al. Citation1957).
Walther Citation(1995) provides a detailed review of experimental studies and theoretical approaches to relational communication in computer-mediated systems.
Lee Citation(2004) proposes a three-part typology based on the literature that examines presence as a theoretical construct in communication research.
British sociologist John Thompson proposes a strikingly similar concept, ‘mediated quasi-interaction’, defined as ‘social relations established by the media of mass communication’ (in this case, television) (Thompson Citation1995, p. 84).
In the foreword to Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Williams acknowledges discussions about ‘new and emerging’ media technologies with colleagues at Stanford University in California, particularly Edwin Parker, as an important influence on his thinking about television (Williams Citation1975, pp. 7–8). Williams wrote much of Television while visiting Stanford in the early 1970s, where Parker and his colleagues were among the first communication researchers to investigate the convergence of ICTs and mass media.