An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld and the History of American Mass Communication Research
Columbia University, New York City, PhD Thesis, (2006)Abstract
The main memory of American mass communication research holds that scholars around Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in the years during and after World War II, dispelled the conventional wisdom that media marinate the defenseless American mind. According to the story, a loose and undisciplined body of pre-war thought had concluded naively that media are powerful—a myth punctured by the rigorous studies of Lazarsfeld and others, which showed time and again that media impact is in fact limited. This storyline, first narrated in Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence (1955), remains textbook boilerplate and literature review dogma fifty years later. The dissertation traces the emergence of this '' powerful-to-limited effects'' disciplinary legend, with special emphasis on the surprising contributions of sociologist Edward Shils, the mandarin theorist and intellectual maverick with little interest in the empirical study of media. In the crucial postwar years, Shils provided an account of the disappearance and reemergence of '' small group'' research, which he framed as a contrast between pictures of society—between the mistaken European view of impersonal isolation as against his view, that Gemeinschaft elements endure. Shils's treatment of small-group research, and especially his embedding of that story in terms of societal imagery, was essential to the field's mnemonic emplotment. Shils had his own intellectual reasons for narrating the history in the manner that he did—reasons rooted in his evolving and deeply engaged search for the underpinnings of modern social order. In a sense, however, his reasons did not matter once the narrative itself was released to the American sociological public; Lazarsfeld and Katz had their own reasons for adopting the historical picture that Shils put forward—reasons largely centered on scholarly competition and norms of originality. The powerful-to-limited-effects narrative in Personal Influence, in turn, was so widely embraced in the late 1950s for a still-different set of reasons—because of the scholarly support it lent to the public intellectual defense of American popular culture, in the context of an evolving Cold War liberalism. The staying power of this limited-effects narrative was ultimately guaranteed, however, by the newly institutionalized, would-be discipline of '' communication''—which retained the storyline as a usable, and teachable, past.