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Journal of Communication ISSN 0021–9916
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The Beginnings of Mass Communication:A
Transnational History
Peter Simonson1, Junya Morooka2, Bingjuan Xiong3& Nathan Bedsole1
1 Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA 80309
2 College of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University Tokyo, Japan, 171-8501
3 School of International Communications, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China, 315100
Mass communication was one of the central signs through which communication research
constituted itself in the post-World War II era. An American term, it indexed and
communicatively advanced the problematization of media that took shape from the
1920s onward. Recently, scholars have debated the term’s continued relevance, typically
without awareness of its history or international contexts of use. To provide needed
background and enrich eorts to globalize the eld, we oer a transnational history of
mass communication, illuminating the sociological, cultural, and geopolitical dynamics of
its emergence, dissemination, and reception. Mapping locations of its adoption, adaption,
andrejectionacrossworldregions,weoeramethodologyandahistoricalnarrativeto
shed light on the early globalization of the eld and lines of power and resistance that
shapedit.WeshowhowthetermcarriesaresidueofpostwarAmericanhegemony,and
argue for greater reexive awareness of our vocabularies of inquiry.
Keywords: History of Communication Studies, Mass Communication, Global and Transna-
tional Media Research, Sociology of Knowledge, UNESCO
doi:10.1093/joc/jqz027
At the turn of this century, an essay appeared with the provocative title, “The
End of Mass Communication?” (Chaee and Metzger, 2001). Its lead author, Steven
Chaee, was one of the leading mass communication researchers of his generation
and had studied with the man who led the way in institutionalizing the eld, Wilbur
Schramm. The essay gave resonant voice to a view that had been circulating in
mainstream mass communication research circles for more than a decade: that
“the term mass communication” sat uneasily at best “in the new decentralized and
demassied media environment,” and that mass communication theory would need
Corresponding author: Peter Simonson; e-mail: peter.simonson@colorado.edu
Journal of Communication 69 (2019) 513–538 © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of
International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
to be revised for the new age (Chaee and Metzger, 2001, pp. 365, 374; cf. Tur o w,
1992). More than 500 citations index the broader discourse circulating on the topic.
One stream of that discourse—sometimes played out within journals, schools,
and organizations whose names bear the now-troublesome term—raises a series
of questions: does the term mass communication still name an important, albeit
changed, type of mediated communication? Is it a pliable enough term to warrant
reconceptualization for the current media environment? Should we discard it and
adopt a new term for a new era? (see e.g. Bennett & Iyengar, 2008;Lang & Lang, 2009;
Napoli, 2010;Perlo, 2015).Thedebatevariablyaddressesthetermitself,theconcept
it signies, the socio-technological processes it indexes, and the theories developed
to explain those processes. Across much of the debate, two things are noteworthy:
(a) it is largely uninformed by careful history; and (b) it frequently operates with
an implicit provincialism that projects the U.S. experience of mass media onto the
concept itself. In both these ways, the debate itself is the recognizable product of a
U.S. model of media inquiry that achieved hegemony in the postwar era, organized
around the sign now in question: mass communication.1
We provide needed background to this debate and embrace a broader, more global
image of the eld by investigating the emergence and transnational history of the
term itself: the beginnings of mass communication, as it were. We hope to make
four contributions: (a) to reveal lines of U.S. hegemony, historical contingency, and
resistance surrounding the adoption of a key term and forms of media inquiry related
to it; (b) to throw new light on the transnational history of communication and media
studiesbyshowinghowatermthatoriginatedinU.S.mediaindustriesenteredthe
universalizing discourses of mid-century American social science and spread globally
in the postwar era; (c) to advance a distinctive methodology for investigating elds
by paying close sociological attention to key terms of inquiry and the rhetorical work
they do in particular contexts; and (d) to add a component to global communication
study by investigating the circulation of ways of naming and conceptualizing media.
Keytermsindexconceptsandbroaderwaysofconceivingsocialworlds.Theyare
also historically contingent, rhetorical condensations of aspirations and ideologies;
symbolic boundary markers between positions and groups; and strategic components
in broader arguments and institutional initiatives. All of these have been true of
mass communication,whichwasoneofthe central terms around which the eld
constituted itself in the 20th century. As we show, it emerged from a distinctive
American cultural grammar, spread through a range of transnational agencies, and
entangled itself within particular cultural contexts around the globe, many of which
had competing ways of naming and conceiving the new media environment of
the 20th century. Against the common but anachronistic textbook tale that mass
communication began with print (e.g. McQuail, 2010;Schramm, 1960), we argue
for starting with historically situated terminology and the concepts indexed by its
social use. In taking this approach, we follow the leads of Simonson (2010),who
sketched the U.S. origins of the term in the 1920s; Bratslavsky (2015),whounpacked
its meanings during the creation of a mass communications history collection in the
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
1950s; and Liu (2013) and Lin and Nerone (2016), who excavated its early translations
in China. We signicantly expand those leads by charting the term’s circulation
and cultural reception in strategic locations across four continents, giving textured
accounts of the social dynamics of its transnational movement, and advancing an
explicit methodology for conducting such work.
Our story extends important cross-disciplinary eorts to investigate the transna-
tional history of the social sciences by focusing on “connections across national
borders and the circulation of ideas, people, and products these enable” (Heilbron,
Guilhot, & Jeanpierre, 2008, p. 147). It extends both recent work in the history of
communication studies (e.g. Averbeck-Lietz, 2017;Simonson & Park, 2016)and
eorts to tell more entangled, transnational histories of the eld (Löblich & Averbeck-
Lietz, 2016). Methodologically, our eort is, in some ways, reminiscent of Raymond
Williams’ (1976) keywords project, but oers a more nely grained social history
of terms in use. We are guided by sociological semantics: a method for investigating
culturally strategic words and phrases from (a) their “social origins, identifying which
socialgroupsusedthem,alongwithwhen,whereandhowtheydidso”;and(b)their
“paths of diusion, i.e. [their] reception and subsequent evolution, changing mean-
ings,dissemination,ordisappearance”(Camic, 2011, p. 166). The method informed
aveinofRobertK.Merton’swork,andweadoptanamethatheconsideredforit,
sociological rhetoric, to signal our attention to terms as at once indices of signicant
social phenomena and performative agents operating in particular, sociologically
constrained contexts shaped by ideologies, institutions, identities, relationships, and
strategic actions.
We advance our method as a complement to Löblich and Scheu’s (2011) valuable
sociological approach to the history of communication studies. They conceive disci-
plines as constituted around a specic subject; as structured by the interrelations of
ideas, biographical actors, and institutions; and as embedded within constellations
of other disciplines and broader socio-political and economic contexts. We extend
their model by drawing closer attention to the role of language, which serves as a
medium through which ideas take symbolic form, actors constitute dierentiated
communities of inquiry, and institutions organize themselves. Central terms like mass
communication have situated our eld among other academic disciplines and partici-
pated in the broader geopolitical dynamics of the last century. More generally, a soci-
ological rhetoric of key terms can illuminate interrelationships among biographies,
ideas, institutions, and sociopolitical contexts, and reveal aspects of “the institutional
architecture and intellectual legacies that shape academic cultures” (Waisbord, 2016,
p. 870). Utilizing it for transnational inquiry also moves the historiography of media
research toward the eld of global communication studies, as we can see how key
terms traverse geographical borders while taking on meaning within the particular
contexts of their active reception (cf. Kraidy & Murphy, 2008).
Empirically, our history is based on archival and online research into uses of
the term mass communication in English and translations of it in Spanish, French,
German, Japanese, and Chinese. Our primary focus is academic and related intel-
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
lectual discourses in which academics played a part: our way of recognizing that
academic elds bleed over into other social realms that help shape them. During our
investigation, we developed a corpus of three kinds of primary texts, namely those
containing: (a) the earliest usages of the term mass communication and its translations
that we could nd; (b) signicant early usages of the term that contributed to patterns
of institutionalization or rejection in dierent national contexts, with a determination
made on the basis of an individual’s or organization’s prominence in the extant
historiography of the eld; and (c) evidence of ongoing work by organizations,
social networks, or discourses in advancing the term’s circulation. We generated
that corpus through three kinds of research: (a) an extensive online search for mass
communication and its various translations through JSTOR, Google Scholar, World-
Cat, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and the National Diet Catalog
(Japan); (b) archival research in person and through online repositories of historical
documents for the United Nations Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Economic Commission for Latin
America (CEPAL); and (c) careful readings of key library holdings of historical
journals in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
From that corpus, we selected cases across cultural, geopolitical, and linguistic
contexts, representing signicant vectors of the term’s global history. The cases
arenotexhaustive,norcouldtheybewithinthelimitsofanarticleandourown
competencies. From them we developed focused, sociologically hued vignettes of
the term’s circulation and reception in nine national contexts (the United States,
Japan, China, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ecuador, and
Venezuela), ve transnational organizations (the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO,
CEPAL, the International Center for the Study of Journalism [CIESPAL], and the
Catholic Church); and one broader North-South assemblage (modernization initia-
tives in Latin America and, in a much more limited way, Africa and South/Southeast
Asia). In each, we interpreted the reception of mass communication through a relevant
historiography of the eld and related institutions.
We argue that mass communication, in its cultural origins, was a distinctly
American term, albeit one inuentially adopted by a blend of native-born and
émigré scholars. Its postwar dissemination reected U.S. geopolitical hegemony and
its correlate in U.S. social science. That inuence was felt within UNESCO, where
the American introduction of the term was at once controversial and reective of
that organization’s postwar mission; its adoption there became a major locus of the
term’s global dissemination. Around the world, the processes of adoption, adaption,
and rejection of the term were complex and heterogeneous. Some were linked to
local resonance of the then-dominant model of mass media that was indexed to the
term—a more or less centralized source transmitting messages outward to a vast and
dispersed audience—and of the positivist, behaviorist model of mass communication
research attached to it. Beyond the general forces of hegemony, geopolitics, and
intellectual resonance, however, we draw out ve more specic factors that structured
patterns of reception across our cases: (a) cultural and linguistic resonance of a term
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
that sounded awkward in many contexts; (b) local political and religious ideologies
and their relative congruence with U.S. free market liberalism; (c) the presence
and relative strength of local traditions of journalism/press science; (d) locations of
individuals or organizations within social networks of knowledge production; and
(e) the value of the term within particular rhetorical contexts of use. We illustrate
them in what follows.
The historical origins of mass communication
OnecouldarguethatonlyintheUnitedStatescouldmass communication have
emerged with the potential for a strong positive valence. It sutured two longer-
standing transnational discourses within a distinctive U.S. cultural grammar,
inected by liberalism and popular democracy. Since the late 17th century, a discourse
of communication had gathered force across the North Atlantic and begun to take
shape as a keyword of liberal modernity (Heyer, 1988;Peters, 1989). It stood for free
and open discourse, but also informed speculative histories of civilizational progress
that were driven by the development of language, writing, literacy, and print. By the
turn of the 20th century, disparate streams of thought infused by liberalism had made
communication both a normative political ideal and a fundamental social process of
coordination and exchange through the movement of materials, messages, and ideas
(Simonson, Peck, Craig, & Jackson, 2013).
While there were important dierences in discourses of communication across
national borders, it was the U.S. cultural grammar of mass that was decisive to the
invention of the new compound term. Compare the United Kingdom, where in
the 19th century mass and masses took on competing valences in conservative and
socialist thought: in the rst case signaling a low, ignorant, and unstable multitude;
andinthesecondapotentiallyrevolutionarygroupinsocialsolidarityagainst“the
classes” (Briggs, 1985). What was true in the United Kingdom was also true elsewhere
in Europe. In contrast, U.S. forms of popular democracy and evangelical Christianity
createdadierent,morepopulistsemanticspaceneitherelitistnorrevolutionary.
In the 1830s, evangelical preachers staged mass religious revivals to save souls;
Jacksonian popular democracy ushered in an era of party-based mass meetings, mass
rallies, and mass parades; and newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett pioneered
the penny press to serve “the great mass of the community—the merchant, mechanic,
working people” (quoted in Hughes, 1940,p.11).NewspapermanWaltWhitman’s
poetry served as an aesthetic touchstone for these democratic masses, providing a
counterweight to elite discourses of disparagement present in the United States too.
In the 1920s, mass communication took root in the contexts of eorts to legiti-
matize radio broadcasting within an unfolding American model, blending market-
driven commercial ownership with the need to serve the public interest. Across
languages and national contexts, dozens of compound “mass” terms were coined
in this era, many carrying an ominous ring (e.g. mass hysteria, mass man). Mass
communication could also portend darker things, but in the United States it provided
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
a relatively favorable alternative to other descriptions of newer media. Commer-
cially driven national radio networks were not examples of “chain broadcasting” or
“monopolies of the air,” as their critics asserted. They were forms of mass communi-
cation, a term that in radio industry usage typically carried a sense of public service—
communication for the masses—while also promising advertisers an enormous
audience for their appeals (Simonson, 2010).
The new term migrated into academic discourse in the 1930s, oen advanced by
individualswithtiestotheradioindustry.Forinstance,HermanHettinger (1935,
p. ix), a professor of marketing who had conducted commercial listening studies
in the late 1920s, edited a special issue peppered with contributions from industry
gures eager to assent that radio had “grown into the greatest medium of mass
communication” since Gutenberg. At the time, the sociologists Malcolm Willey and
Stuart Rice (1933, p. 155) were grouping radio together with newspapers, magazines,
and motion pictures as “agencies of mass impression,” which carried a rather dierent
sense. Soon Willey too would adopt the term mass communication,thoughina
dierent and more critical sense: perhaps the rst of many redenitions of the term.
By the mid-1930s, there were clear signs that mass communication was undergo-
ing a process of problematization, from which it would take form as a more genial
alternative to the widespread “propaganda.” In contrast to the industry apologists,
Willey (1935, pp. 194, 200) conceived mass communication as a “new social environ-
ment” that created “new problems whose signicance has not been fully appreciated.”
Over the next several years, radio researchers began to adopt the term. A key agent
was the Rockefeller Foundation’s Communications Group (1939–1941), organized
to support a large grant made to Paul Lazarsfeld (Gary, 1999). The Foundation’s
grant ocer, John Marshall (1939) conceived the group as a means to develop more
“systematic and disciplined” research “in a eld which for a lack of a better name
Ihavecometocallmasscommunications.”Thetermttheinstitutionalpurposes
of the Foundation, which had committed itself to funding the use of media and
the popular arts as part of a democratically oriented general education campaign.
Unlike propaganda,mass communication implied audience consent and participation
in education and cultural upli (Cmiel, 1996, p. 1). During the war, Rockefeller
funded other media research that adopted the mass communication label. Within the
micro-context of Rockefeller’s communications seminar, the political scientist Harold
Lasswell famously advocated that “the job of research in mass communications is
to determine who, and with what intentions, said what, to whom, and with what
eects” (Rockefeller Communication Seminar, 1940). In future decades, a version
of Lasswell’s formula circulated widely beyond the United States and provided a
framework for behaviorally focused, eects-based media research that was broadly
reective of a transmission view of mass communication.
In the 1940s, inuential U.S. social scientists adopted the term mass communi-
cation, most of whom were involved with Rockefeller projects or collaborated with
participants in the Seminar. There was a tight-knit cohort of academics around
the Oce of War Information and the Library of Congress that included Lasswell,
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
Lazarsfeld, and his colleague at Columbia University, the sociologist Robert K.
Merton, all of whom wrote widely cited studies of mass communication. None
was more important in institutionalizing the term than the University of Iowa’s
Wilbur Schramm, who was also was part of the Oce of War Information cohort
(Cartier, 1988). As Director of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism, he
operated in a dierent disciplinary context and adopted the term as an overarching
sign for a new era of journalism education and research that went well beyond
its traditional, vocational roots. Schramm (1947, p. 15) advocated for “a school of
communication” whose concern “must be all mass communication,” and at Iowa he
established the rst doctoral program in mass communications in the world. He
moved from Iowa to Illinois (1947–1955) to Stanford (1955–1973), transforming
journalism into mass communication at both, and helped institutionalize the new
eld through a series of readers and textbooks, beginning with Mass Communications
(Schramm, 1960, rst ed. 1949). Others who aspired to give journalism education a
greater research focus followed suit. The University of Wisconsin established a Mass
Communication Research Center in 1949, and by 1955, members of its faculty were
collaborating with the State Historical Society to establish a Mass Communications
History Center (Bratslavsky, 2015). By then, Schramm and other U.S. academics
were working with the U.S. government and weaponizing mass communication as
part of anti-communist psychological warfare eorts of the Cold War, where the
term helped signal the potential power of the technologies (Simpson, 1994)andfed
modernization initiatives in the Global South.
International dissemination through UNESCO
Our research indicates that, before 1945, mass communication was a term that had
little, if any, circulation outside the United States. That began to change aer the war,
in no small part due to UNESCO, the single most important institutional locus of
itsglobaldissemination,andasiteofcontestationabouttheterm’smeaningand
place. The term entered UNESCO through U.S. eorts, led by the poet and public
intellectual Archibald MacLeish, who headed the American delegations to planning
meetings. He was well-positioned within the social network that adopted the term:
as Librarian of Congress, he had worked with Lasswell and others in the Rockefeller
Group. He also had a longer anity toward the Foundation’s cultural mission, having
written radio plays and conceived poetry as “public speech” addressed to broad
audiences. When the United States entered the war, he headed the Oce of Facts
and Figures, the main government propaganda bureau at the time, championing the
use of factual information over other kinds of appeals. For him, the term mass com-
munication resonated ideologically with the classic, liberal free ow of information,
a disposition he brought to the organizational design of the United Nation’s cultural
arm.
Under MacLeish’s “energetic leadership” and in the contexts of Allied victory,
the U.S. delegation exerted signicant inuence in the London planning meetings
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
of late 1945 (Cowell, 1966). MacLeish draed the eloquent preamble for UNESCO’s
constitution that tellingly opened, “[si]nce wars begin in the minds of men, it is
inthemindsofmenthatthedefencesofpeacemustbeconstructed”(United
Nations Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization, 1945a). In line with that
orientation, he introduced a U.S. resolution that would expand the agency’s mission
beyond the Education, Science, and Culture identied in its acronym, to “Media of
Mass Communication.” It asserted the “paramount importance [of mass communi-
cation] ...in advancing the purpose of the United Nations to maintain international
peace and security by the spread of knowledge and mutual understanding” and
advocated partnerships between UNESCO and media industries (United Nations
Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization, 1945b, p. 68). The U.S. resolution
was successful, and mass communication entered Article I of UNESCO’s constitution
as the rst-named means to promote the organization’s mission of promoting peace,
security, justice, and human rights through education, science, and culture.
UNESCO’s incorporation of the U.S. term was complex and contested. It took
shape within the visionary spirit of utopian one-worldism that marked the orga-
nization’s early years (Wisselgren, 2017). The organization oriented itself toward
broader populations: “the masses of common people” and “the needs and the men-
tality of the man in the street” (Opocensky, 1949–50, p. 63). The Media of Mass
Communication Committee of UNESCO’s Preparatory Commission served as the
siteofstruggle.Consonantwiththeswirlingutopiancurrents,membersoftheU.S.
delegation unleashed optimistic, even sublime, potentialities of the term within its
American cultural grammar. They declared the “fundamental importance to the
question of Mass Communication” as the search for “a new wavelength, a new fre-
quency, a new dimension, transcending and penetrating purely economic and polit-
ical frontiers” to establish contact among peoples and eect their desire to nd peace
(Sub-Commission on Mass Communication, 1946, p. 4). Some of that sentiment
found its way into the Commission’s published report, which cast mass communi-
cation as a “technological revolution” that justied “a new idealism, a new faith” in
reason and science, and “goodwill and understanding among the nations” (United
Nations Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization, 1946–47, pp. 519, 522,
539).
Much to their surprise, the U.S. delegation experienced “considerable, and ...
unanticipated, hostility” to their eorts to incorporate mass communication into the
heart of UNESCO’s mission. There was skepticism about using mass media for inter-
national understanding and worries that American media industries would promote
“cultural imperialism” (United States Delegation to the First General Conference
of United Nations Educational, Scientic, and Cultural Organization, n.d., p. 18).
The French delegation, headed by journalist Ève Curie, led resistance to both the
American term and the initiatives linked to it, amplifying power questions subsumed
in the U.S. version of UNESCO’s universalism. The French preferred to speak
individually of radio, press, and cinema, each of which raised dierent issues. Mass
communication obfuscated these dierences and invited critical questions about “who
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
holds the truth to put before the masses? ... [and whether] we want to encourage a
‘mass’ press or, on the contrary, to maintain the originality of thought and opinion of
each?”. The “imposition of a uniform civilisation and ‘standardised’ ways of thinking
...by ‘mass communication’ is denitely undesirable,” she went on, urging UNESCO
not confuse, “under the expression ‘mass communication,’ pure information with
propaganda.” The so-called free ow of communication originated with “one or more
countries particularly well-equipped for the purpose,” a felt danger for those nations
whose media infrastructures had been decimated by the war (Curie, 1946,p.2).The
French found the term to be mystifying in its generality and worrisome in its capacity
for standardization, centralization, and cultural imperialism. Tactically, they focused
on press-related initiatives and resisted American eorts to advocate the free ow of
communications in general.
Mass communication was institutionalized in and disseminated through
UNESCO, but the term didn’t always translate easily. While the French communica-
tion de masse and the Spanish comunicación de masas made sporadic appearances,
UNESCO generally used information and información in their ocial discourses.
These terms avoided the diculties that mass communication could produce, while
also separating information from propaganda, as Curie and others advocated. Yet
the organization gave the English term institutional legs and transnational reach. It
began publishing Reports and Papers on Mass Communication in 1952, which in turn
helped feed the founding of the International Association for Mass Communication
Research (IAMCR) 5 years later—also christened with a French name l’Association
Internationale des Études et Recherches sur l’Information. Beyond circulating print
publications and an international professional association, UNESCO also sponsored
mass communication research around the globe in the decade aer the war,
advancing mass communication well beyond its national origins. We consider
its career across three world regions, where distinct tensions and socio-political
dynamics mediated the sign’s uptake.
East Asia
Outside the United States, it would be hard to nd a nation where the term was taken
up more energetically than Japan. Geopolitics was a major driver. Led by the Amer-
icans, Allied Forces occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952. The Civil Information and
EducationDivisionoftheoccupationundertookaradicaltransformationofJapanese
education, aimed at injecting liberal democratic principles into an educational system
that had become nationalistic, militaristic, and devoted to the Emperor. During the
interwar years, Japanese universities gained their bearings from Germany, which in
turn shaped press studies in the model of Zeitungwissenscha,newspaperscience
(Schäfer, 2012). Believing that a free press was key to the democratization of Japan,
the Civil Information and Education Division facilitated the founding of American-
style journalism schools and research institutes, which provided one push for the
Japanese adoption of mass communication.
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
At the same time, Japanese intellectuals looked to the Anglophone West to
reorient Japanese philosophy and social science, some of them actively adopting
mass communication, which they struggled to translate. One group clustered around
the journal Shis¯
onoKagaku(Science of Thought), where the term made its earliest
appearance. The journal’s founders included Hiroshi Minami, who had earned
his PhD in social psychology from Cornell in 1943, and Ichiro Iguchi, who had
worked in the pre-war eld of Japanese press science and taught newspaper policy
in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In 1947, Iguchi reviewed Smith, Lasswell, and
Casey’s Propaganda, Communication, and Public Opinion and introduced mass com-
munication, which he translated as taish¯
u(the masses) dentatsu (transmission). That
term didn’t stick, nor did the term used to translate the UNESCO constitution,
taish¯
uts
¯
uh¯
o(literally, reporting information to the masses). By 1950, the loan word
masu komyunik¯
eshon began to appear, and a year later Iguchi published Masu
Komyunik¯
eshon, the rst Japanese book to use the term in its title. In 1954, 2
years aer the end of occupation, Minami published K¯
oza Masu Komyunik¯
eshon
(Contemporary Mass Communication) and Schramm’s edited volume, Mass Com-
munications, was translated into Japanese, spurring further academic and public
interest.
Though adoption of the loan term was relatively quick, its academic life was
politically complex. The remembered history in Japan typically emphasizes the liberal
democratic sensibilities of both Allied authorities and Japanese adopters (Sato, 2017).
In fact, there was continuity between the postwar order and the German-inuenced
tradition of press science and defenders of the authoritarian regime. Particularly
noteworthy were Eiz¯
oKoyamaandKeiz
¯
o Yoneyama. Both were trained in Japanese
Zeitungwissenscha and both served in government roles during the war (Kushner,
2006;Schäfer, 2012). Aer the war, the Allied occupation authorities exonerated
Koyama and Yoneyama and enlisted them in public opinion activities, which gave
them access to recent literature in mass communication and helped them initiate
a new iteration of the eld (Ikuta, 2007;Sato, 2017). Still, other scholars trained in
the Zeitungswissenscha tradition were critical of the American approach into the
early 1950s and maintained allegiance to shinbungaku (newspaper studies), which
expanded to designate a broader eld of study. Among them was Hideo Ono,
President of the Journalism Society of Japan (Nihon Shimbun Gakkai, est. 1951), who
criticized the positivist, behaviorist approach of mass communication research in
the rst issue of the society’s journal. It was only aer the introduction of television
broadcasting in 1953 and the fuller embrace of U.S. theories that the trend shied
away from shinbungaku. In sum, though Japan’s postwar liberalism, turn toward
U.S. social science, and networks of scholars with American ties all encouraged the
adoption of the term mass communication, local traditions of press science provided
pockets of resistance.
In contrast, mass communication metstrongerresistanceinChina,intheforms
of political ideology, culture, and language. Mao Zedung’s victory in China’s Com-
munist Revolution (1945–1949) brought a decisive halt to earlier anities toward
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Western liberalism. In its dierent political context, Chinese scholars had embraced
U.S. models of journalism education and writings on communication and publics.
The word communication entered Chinese discourse in the 1920s, variably translated
as kuo san (dissemination), chuan bo (diusion),and jiao tong (transportation; Liu,
2014). Aer the revolution, the situation was dierent. The dominant concept/term
guiding the press and radio was xuanchan: propaganda, understood in its non-
pejorative, communist sense as the dissemination of the true worldview and interests
of the proletariat. This gave rise to a Chinese Marxist tradition of journalism and
propaganda studies that advanced the political struggle and resisted capitalist alter-
natives.
The tale of mass communication in China in the 1950s runs through two dier-
ently oriented journalism programs. Beijing’s Renmin University had been founded
by the Communist Party in the 1930s and opened a Journalism School in 1954, largely
staed by former People’s Daily journalists. Shanghai’s Fudan University opened its
Journalism School in 1929 and absorbed the Journalism Department of the former
missionary school of St. John’s University in 1949. The Party threatened to close it in
1952, but it survived under the leadership of Professor Wang Zhong. In 1956, aer
Mao encouraged criticism of the party line (“let a hundred owers blossom and a
hundred schools of thought contend”), Wang began publishing Journalism Trans-
lation Series, a journal that introduced contemporary Western theories into China.
With linguistic diculties, it became the point of entry for mass communication.
Over several articles in 1956–57, the term was translated as qunzhong jiatong jigou
(the organization of mass transportation), qunzhong sixiang jiatong (transportation
of the masses’ thought), and nally dazhong chuanbo (mass dissemination), which
remains the term of art today (Lin and Nerone, 2016; Liu, 2013). The journal was the
site of critique of Western bourgeois capitalist journalism, but also reected Wang’s
openness to aspects of it, particularly the functionalist emphasis on the needs of
society and readers alike (Hu, Deqiang, & Lei, 2016). Renmin’s Gan Xifen and other
hardliners rejected Wang’s measured openness, which Gan roundly criticized in a
famous exchange. For him, mass communication was inextricably part of a conceptual
apparatus warranting socialist critique. By 1957 Mao’s “hundred owers” opening
had generated a strong anti-rightist reaction, and mass communication was fully
coded as a piece of capitalist ideology. This only changed in the 1980s, in a dierent
moment of opening toward the West.
Weste r n E u rop e
Across Europe, there were variably established traditions of press studies that reorga-
nized themselves aer the war’s disruptions. Typically humanistic and with a strong
historical bent, European press studies had their strongest expression in German
Zeitungwissenscha, inuential in Northern Europe and elsewhere. In Germany,
this tradition had been compromised by its entanglements with the Third Reich.
It reformed in the postwar era under a new name, Publizistikwissenscha,which
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cast general attention on public phenomena and took a practical focus that linked
scholars and media professionals (Wiedemann, 2016). The tradition of press sci-
ence—anchored by texts, pedagogy, and a generation of scholars who came of age
in it—provided cultural resistance to the discourse of mass communication and
the American-style social science oen tied to it. But the story was complex and
depended on locations within social networks and generational position, among
other factors.
One key gure mediating contact between European press science and U.S. mass
communication research was Kurt Baschwitz. A Jewish German who ed the Nazis
in 1935, he moved to the Netherlands and secured a post teaching press history
at the University of Amsterdam. One of a handful of scholars who before the war
had advocated for incorporating sociology and psychology into Zeitungwissenscha,
hewasinvolvedwithUNESCOfromitsearlydaysandwasafoundingmemberof
IAMCR. In 1948, he formed the Dutch Institute of the Science of the Press. From that
position, and drawing on his own early work in propaganda and mass psychology,
Baschwitz advocated for a regured European press science reecting the knowledge
and challenges of the age: a “science of the press and mass psychology” (quoted in
Wieten, 2005, p. 525). His identication reected a generational perspective shared
by others. Socialized into press science early in their careers, scholars coming of age
before the war had professional identities enmeshed with the eld. Revision, not
rejection, was the order of the day.
These eorts gained tangible form in the Gazette,arguablythemostimportant
European media journal of the immediate postwar era, which Baschwitz founded
in 1955. As he wrote in its rst issue, the Gazette was an “international professional
periodical for the science of the press.” The name was deliberate: “science of the press
... is one of the oldest in the category of modern social sciences.” Though it “has
greatly outgrown its original, and much too restricted meaning,” Baschwitz retained
the name because it signaled that the press was of prime importance and that the
science devoted to it could reliably treat related subjects, including public opinion,
propaganda, and advertising, as well as radio, television, and lm (Baschwitz, 1955,
p. 1). In the U.S. context, mass communication encompassed all of these subjects,
and mass communication research was the new eld for investigating them. Into
the 1960s, European press science presented a live alternative (as it did in Japan into
the 1950s), and the Gazette consciously positioned itself as a bridge among scholars,
practitioners, and politicians. There was no U.S. equivalent to this regional tradition
of research.
Ecumenically, the Gazette made room for U.S. mass communication research
as one approach among several. Baschwitz himself had limited English-language
competencies, but the library of his press institute housed all of the latest U.S. work
in mass communication, which his students summarized for him (van Ginneken,
2018, p. 293). In 1959, when the Gazette became the ocial journal of the IAMCR,
it adopted a new subtitle that reected that institutional aliation, International
Journal for Mass Communications Studies: the rst scholarly journal that would
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
incorporate the term into its title. At the same time, it never adopted the broader
U.S. paradigm.
While Baschwitz, in the Dutch context, sought to enlarge the tradition of Euro-
pean press science and nd points of contact with mass communication research,
the lines in Germany were less permeable. Among scholars studying public com-
munication, Massenkommunikation was a term signaling positivist, American-style,
empirical social scientic research (M. Meyen, 23 May 2014, personal communica-
tion).MembersoftheFrankfurtSchool,forinstance,rarelyusedit,takingMassenkul-
tur as their preferred term; likewise, scholars of Publizistik, whose orientations to
publics and practitioners paralleled Baschwitz’s, rarely used the term. In this context,
Massenkommikation got little play in German discourse in the 1950s.
A key exception was Gerhard Maletzke, researcher at the University of Hamburg’s
Hans-Bredow-Institut for broadcasting research. Maletzke had written undergradu-
ate and doctoral theses on radio (1949–50) and worked under social psychologist
Curt Bondy, recently returned from a 10-year exile in the United States (Lacasa-Mas,
Meyen, and Löblich, 2015). Bondy introduced Maletzke to U.S. positivist research and
served as a strategically located gure mediating U.S. and German social psychology.
Maletzke (1954a,1954b)advancedthisblendedstyleinarticlesfortheInstitut’s
journal, applying the communication paradigm prevalent in U.S. social psychology
to the study of Publizistik.ThismeantembracingMassenkommunikation,conceived
in the U.S. manner as a covering term for newspapers, mass print, lm, radio,
and television. It gave him a spacious concept/term that both marked o media
communication as a domain for social psychology and provided a young researcher
with a mode for distinguishing himself within Publizistik.AeratriptotheUnited
States 9 years later, Maletzke (1963) wrote his post-doctoral thesis, Psychologie der
Massenkommunikation, which laid the foundations for an empirical social science
of mass communication in Germany and served to mark the broader transition
from Publizistikwissenscha to a U.S.-style Kommunikationswissenscha (Lacasa-
Mas, Meyen, and Löblich, 2015;Löblich, 2007). Coming to Publizistik through
psychologically oriented radio research, linked to the network of U.S. social scientists
by his mentor, and part of a new generation of researchers, Maletzke was triply
situated to adopt the new term.
Outside press science and its postwar reformulations, mass communication was
adopted by other Western European scholars who were in conversation with U.S.
research or found it to be a powerful rhetorical marker of transformations of 20th-
century life. Book reviews were one early but typically limited portal (e.g. Davy,
1949;de Luis, 1949). More signicantly, scholars across several disciplines adopted
it to signal distinct aspects of the contemporary world and advance longer-standing
narratives of communication and modernity. Consider three examples. Dutch soci-
ologist E.W. Hofstee (1958, p. 510) gestured toward modernization in an article
on diering mortality rates across regions in the Netherlands that identied mod-
ern means of massa-communicatie asakeyforcethathadtransformedlifeinthe
20th century. German historian Hans Rothfels, recently back from a decade of
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
exile to the United States and a 5-year professorship at the University of Chicago,
launched a new journal, Vierteljahrshee für Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary History
Quarterly). He announced in his inaugural editorial that modern means of “propa-
ganda und massenkommunikation” underwrote its mission and the methodologi-
cal challenges of investigating the recent Nazi past (Rothfels, 1953,p.4).French
psychologist and information theorist Abraham Moles (1957, p. 234), a former
electrical engineer, wrote a remarkably original 1956 dissertation, which claimed
that the materiality of new forms of communication de masse created new forms
of perception that, for the rst time, allowed humans to recognize the dierent
modesthroughwhichtheexternalworldmakesitselfpresenttoconsciousness.In
all three of these cases, mass communication both indexed perceived changes in the
contemporary world and rhetorically legitimated broader arguments, theories, and
research initiatives.
In France, mass communication gained an institutional foothold in the 1960s,
though with a dierent meaning than in the United States and those countries that
followed its lead. The term of art in the Francophone world was information, which
wasalsousedacrossmanySpanish-speakingcountries.InFrancophoneAfricaand
the Middle East, the eld developed as Information and generally remains that way
(Ayish, 2016). Moles adopted the American term idiosyncratically. In 1960, however,
attheprestigiousÉcolePratiquedesHautesÉtudesinParis,thesociologist-historian-
philosopher Georges Friedmann founded the Centre d’ Êtudes des Communications
de Masse (CECMAS), whose name was “inspired by the American expression”
(Barthes, 1961, p. 991). The École Pratique des Hautes Études was supported at the
time by the U.S. Ford Foundation, and from 1958 on, Paul Lazarsfeld frequently
visited and convened a seminar there (Averbeck, 2008). Friedman was both intel-
lectually and institutionally positioned to adopt the new term. He had devoted
much of his intellectual energy since the war to investigating what he called the
“total environment” of industrial civilization, occasioned by fundamental changes
in production, transportation, communication, and leisure. In the early 1950s, he
directed the Centré d’ Études Sociologiques, which organized radio and television
research and maintained a library that helped introduce a generation to U.S. social
research (Friedman, 1952;Tréanton, 1991). Friedman had a strong international
prole, was well-versed in American sociology, and was part of Lazarsfeld’s extended
network. He launched CECMAS with philosopher-sociologist Edgar Morin, who had
been writing on cinema in the 1950s, and critic-literary theorist Roland Barthes,
whose 1957 Mythologies collected his essays on popular culture. In other words, all
three men investigated media and culture in their earlier work, which they saw as
transforming the modern world.
CECMAS adopted communication de masse with ambivalence and in a dierent
sense than Americans typically used it. The opening editorial for its new journal
admitted that communication de masse wasunsatisfactorybut,“forlackofanalterna-
tive” they adopted it because it covered “press, radio broadcasting, television, cinema,
publicity,” which together “constitute a unique reality of our century” (Centre d’
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
Êtudes des Communications de Masse, 1961,p.1,trans.).ThoughCommunica-
tions was, in its early years, open to Columbia-style mass communication research,
the CECMAS group used communications de masse more spaciously, consistent
with Friedman’s (and the American Malcolm Willey’s) sense of the “total environ-
ment” of contemporary civilization. In this way, they both adopted and adapted
the U.S. term, giving it a greater cultural sense and prying it from functionalist,
positivist, and behavioral research and the dominant transmission model of mass
communication.
The United Kingdom, in turn, presented a complex case where some of the
most important early adopters of the term were critics of it. In contrast to other
Western European nations, it had no real tradition of university-based press studies,
and academic sociology established itself slowly. Though sharing a language with
the United States, the cultural grammar of mass and masses carried the history of
opposing conservative-elite and socialist senses, without the more centrist, popular
democratic semantic space aorded in the United States. Until the late 1950s, one
found only passing use of mass communication as it typically appeared in British
print. At that point, two kinds of critiques emerged. One came from Christian
religious leaders, who used the term to call attention to the spiritual threat posed
by “the whole system of mass communications” in modern society (Rhodes, 1959,
p. 9). The other came from the emergent New Le, most notably Raymond Williams.
At the end of Culture and Society, he cast critical attention on those cultural forms
that “have been interpreted by the phrase ‘mass-communication’” (Williams, 1958,
p. 302). He rejected that phrase on two grounds: (a) it was inextricably tied to
the concept of masses and a way of seeing people as “gullible, ckle, herdlike, low
in taste and habit”; and (b) the sense of communication it carried was mere one-
way transmission (Williams, 1958, p. 302). For him, “multiple transmission” was
a superior term, though it never gained traction. His resistance was fueled by a
blend of Welsh working-class identications, attunement to the cultural grammar of
keywords, and distance from American sociology. His rejection, famously captured
inthesayingthattherearenomasses,onlywaysofseeingothersasmasses,setthe
tone for the critique of mass communication that Cultural Studies would advance in
the 1970s.
Other Brits would adopt the term, however. One was Richard Hoggart, founding
director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (est. 1964)
and future Assistant Director-General of UNESCO (1971–75). Like Williams, he
worked from literary studies and made passing references to the term in the late
1950s, before writing “Mass Communications in Britain” for the Pelican Guide to
English Literature, which cast the “extraordinary and complicated range of recre-
ational activities put out by the media of mass communication” in their historical,
cultural, and international perspectives (Hoggart, 1961, p. 442). For Hoggart and the
editors of the collection, mass communication was a useful covering term to mark o
newer forms of literary and popular culture. Institutionalization of the term did not
happen at Birmingham, but rather at the University of Leicester, led by sociologist
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James Halloran, who addressed “the challenge of mass communication” in a series
of essays written for an Irish Dominican journal and published in book form a
year later (Halloran, 1963). In contrast to Hoggart’s call for imaginative (i.e. literary,
humanistic) inquiry, Halloran championed disciplined social science as a way to
investigate mass communication as a social problem while attending to both the
broader society that gave rise to it and the moral questions it raised. In so doing, he
wasatonceasocialscientistidentifyingwiththeinvisiblecollegeofcommunication
researchers he cited; a participant in public worries about mass society, moderniza-
tion, and the so-called Americanization of the United Kingdom; and a sympathetic
interlocutor with Catholic and New Le critiques of the commercialization and
ownership of media industries. Mass communication was part of these identica-
tions, and Halloran institutionalized it when he founded Leicester’s Centre for Mass
Communication Research in 1966. As the long-standing President of IAMCR (1972–
1990), Halloran would also play an important institutional role in advancing the
global discourse of the term.
Latin America
The introduction of mass communication into Hispanophone Latin America varied
within national and institutional contexts, but across them was shaped by sev-
eral factors. One was its geopolitical proximity to the United States and the Cold
War politics of the 1950s and ‘60s. Related were international development eorts
connected to the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Ford
Foundation, and U.S. government agencies. In turn, regional traditions of le-leaning
thought provided resources for resistance, while the Catholic Church introduced a
signicant alternative discourse. Finally, there was the diculty of translating the
term into Spanish: UNESCO ocially used información, but through the 1960s,
translations were unstable. We found comunicación de masas,comunicación de las
masas,comunicación con las masas,comunicación masiva,andcomunicación colec-
tiva, with individual texts sometimes using multiple terms.
Perhaps most signicant were the ideological orientations, social networks, and
rhetorical exigencies caught up in modernization initiatives and the ows of dis-
course,printmatter,andpeoplearoundthem.Theseowstraveledinmultiple
directions, but from the North came streams of social scientic research, designated
expertise, and the professionalization of journalism and journalism education. The
United Nations and UNESCO were major loci of these entwined initiatives, with
American paradigms coming to play decisive roles. In the late 1950s, UNESCO held
regional seminars in Strasbourg (1956) and Quito (1958) that issued in the formation
of regional centers for advanced journalism training in France and Ecuador. The
latter, CIESPAL (Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Periodismo para
América Latina)—housed at the Universidad Central de Ecuador and backed by
UNESCO, the Organization of American States, and the Ford Foundation—would
play a major role in the development of journalism education and communication
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research in Latin America through international seminars, publications, and formal
recommendations (Mellado Ruiz, 2010). Occupying a complex institutional space
amongregionaleortstoprofessionalizejournalism education, academic discourses
on the subject from the United States and Europe, and international funding agencies,
CIESPAL mediated the discourse of mass communication in distinct but inuential
ways. On the one hand, it would embrace and disseminate an American model that
largely accorded with Wilbur Schramm’s (1956, p. 1) view that “the study of jour-
nalism [has] evolved into the study of mass communication,” housing journalism,
radio, television, public relations, and advertising together and enjoining them with
the science of communication (Marques de Melo, 1988). On the other hand, CIESPAL
translated the American term as the more communitarian comunicación colectiva
(e.g., Maletzke, 1965;Schramm, 1964) and advanced CienciadelaInformación
instead of Science of Mass Communication. In so doing, the Center in its early
years aligned with the American model but expressed it through a Latin American
idiom. Beyond CIESPAL’s publishing house, however, Latin American translations of
American sociology books drew readers into the problems of comunicación de masas
(e.g., Merton, 1960;Wright, 1963).
In addition to being introduced in translations of U.S. texts, mass communication
entered Latin America most powerfully through modernization discourses. The
story has multiple dimensions, but one important thread runs through 1950s United
Nations initiatives that yoked economic and social development explicitly to the
development of mass communication (United Nations Educational, Scientic, and
Cultural Organization, 1961). These gave rise to regional meetings of media experts
with representatives from governments and international organizations in Latin
America, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab States. (The latter
three would eventually lead to the founding of Institutes of Mass Communication
in India [1965], Nigeria [1967], Kenya [1967], the Philippines [1968], and Egypt
[1969].) Schramm played a role in most of them, recognized as “a leading specialist
in the mass communication eld” (United Nations Educational, Scientic, and
Cultural Organization, 1961,p.15).Hiswasoneamongmanyvoicesadvocating
that so-called underdeveloped peoples be brought into the modern age by using
modern media to disseminate scientically sound information about agriculture,
health, and the home. Regional organizations like the Economic Commission
for Latin America (CEPAL) embraced the vision, worrying before their 1961
meetings in Caracas that less privileged nations lacked satisfactory “medios de
comunicación para las masas,” which in turn hampered eorts at social and
economic development (Economic Commission for Latin America, 1961, p. 11).
Aer Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba (1959), the United States and its allies to
the south felt an increasing geopolitical urgency in Latin America. Development
initiatives aligned with eorts to cultivate a professionalized journalism of objec-
tivity in the American model. Both harnessed, centralized channels of mass
communication to promote liberal modernization and free-market capitalism (Lugo-
Ocando, 2018).
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Others in Latin America were instead inspired by the Cuban Revolution and drew
upon regional traditions of le democratic populism in resisting mass communication
and the technocratic intrusions from the North connected to it. One of the earliest
prominent voices was teaching in Caracas as CEPAL held its meetings there: the
Italian-born, French-educated Venezuelan philosopher and communication scholar
Antonio Pasquali. The end of a military dictatorship and return of populist former
president Rómulo Betancourt in the late 1950s opened space for Pasquali and others
at the Universidad Central de Venezuela to turn their attention toward national
culture and social problems (Sánchez Naverte, 2017). In Paris (1955–57), Pasquali
had studied philosophy with Paul Ricouer and lm with Edgar Morin, taking
a phenomenological and critical approach to the former and a socio-historical
approach to the latter, and he was appointed to the faculties of both Philosophy and
Journalism at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. During the dictatorship, the
SchoolofJournalismhadembracedAmericanparadigms,butaerwarditpursued
regional identications and le-democratic politics. Philosophically, Pasquali was
attunedtomediaassociallyembeddedwaysofseeingtheworldwithstrongethical
dimensions. Socially, he worked with native-born and émigré scholars building
Venezuelan solidarities. These factors put distance between him, U.S. paradigms, and
related development initiatives. When Pasquali turned to mass communication in the
late 1950s and early ‘60s, it was in the spirit of critique. On the one hand, he called
for intellectuals to engage more fully with audio-visual media as important forms of
popular expression and understanding. On the other hand, he rejected comunicación
de masas as “a agrant contradiction in terms that ought to be prohibited” (Pasquali,
1963, p. 39), like Williams taking up the ethico-political view that it was impossible to
enter into a relation of communication in the one-way transmission of information
via mass media.
Over the next two decades, an alternative to mass communication took root in
Latin America: comunicación social. Originating in the Catholic Church, it was the
Spanish translation of the Latin communicatio socialis,atheologicaltermofart
invented in the 1959–62 preparations for the Second Vatican Council convened by
Pope Paul VI (Eilers, 1987). A commission on the Modern Means of the Apostolate
was tasked with considering the role of mass media in the contemporary Church. Its
work led to Inter Mirica (Pope Paul VI, 1963), a Papal decree on “the instruments
of social communication.” The Latin title arose from the text’s opening words,
“among the wonderful,” which described those technological discoveries that “have
uncovered new avenues of communicating most readily news, views and teachings
of every sort” (Pope Paul VI, 1963, para 1). Most centrally, this meant “the press,
movies, radio, television and the like, [which] can, of their very nature, reach and
inuence, not only individuals, but the very masses and the whole of human society”
(Pope Paul VI, 1963). The preparatory commissions for Inter Mirica considered a
number of terms to capture these wonderful new technological means, including
mass communication, whose spaciousness they found appealing. But to the ears of
the 20 mostly European priests on the commission, the American term rang too
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pessimistic, suggesting a massication of audiences and an implicit condemnation
of modern inventions that the Church was cautiously championing (Baragli, 1966).
Social communication encompassed an even broader range of forms, while also
aligning better with the apostolic and educational aims of the Church. Ocially
introduced in 1963, communicatio socialis resonated particularly strongly in Latin
America, where mass communication never sat well linguistically, and communica-
tion research was just beginning to institutionalize itself. By 1980, 65 of the 163 Latin
American educational centers in communication had adopted comunicación social
into their names (Nixon, 1981). IAMCR followed suit when it added Spanish as a
third ocial language in the 1970s, christening the organization La Asociación Inter-
nacional de Estudios de Comunicación Social. In German, soziale Kommunikation
also gained traction among Catholic scholars, represented in one way by the journal
Communicatio Socialis (founded 1968).
Conclusion
Mass communication emerged with a sense of epochal change that suited it for
incorporation into discourses of modernization and modernity alike. These were
initially spoken with an American accent that never quite faded, even as it was trans-
lated and incorporated into other cultural contexts around the world. Advanced ini-
tially by American capitalism, universalizing American social science, and forward-
looking American or American-inuenced institutions of cultural reform, mass
communication was born into worlds not inclined to either historical reection or
reexive awareness of cultural particularity. These qualities arguably still characterize
reections on the continuing relevance of the term and inherited theories connected
to it. Were we to abandon the term completely, we might put some additional distance
between the U.S. intellectual and geopolitical hegemony that have helped structure
the eld and the more robustly globalized community of inquiry straining to be
born.
Our essay has tried to reinscribe both historicity and cultural specicity to the
now century-long discourse of mass communication.Intheprocess,we’veoereda
new chapter in the global history of the eld, driven methodologically by a transna-
tional,sociologicalrhetoricofthiskeyterm.Substantively,wehaveilluminated
entanglements of culture, geopolitics, and social networks that shaped early eorts
to conceptualize and name media as a collective phenomenon and constitute a new
eld of study. Attuned to cultural contexts of origin, pathways of diusion, and
social patterns of adoption, adaption, and resistance, this methodology, we believe,
is a useful addition to historiography and the sociology of knowledge in an era of
global social imaginaries and media research attentive to the interplay of the local
and translocal.
The emergence of mass communication was a tale of transnational discourses
of two longstanding terms uniting within a U.S. cultural grammar, where it found
rhetorical use as a term of legitimation for commercial broadcasting. Its spread was
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Beginnings of Mass Communication P. Simonson et al.
then tied to U.S. geopolitical hegemony, the related postwar power of American social
science, and the cross-border mobilities of people, print matter, and institutions like
UNESCO. We focused on early histories of terminological reception in three world
regions to illustrate the varied, cross-national dynamics of reception consequential
to the early making of the eld. In the process, we drew attention to a number of
competing terms indexed to dierent models of media inquiry and practice, and
advanced by dierent assemblages of culture, institutions, and social collectives:
xuanchan, information,Publizistik,andcomunicación social,amongothers.While
American power and postwar hegemony provide a broad explanation for the global
dissemination of mass communication,wetriedtoshowhowvefactorsshaped
reception of the term:
1. Cultural and linguistic resonance. Traditions of popular democracy, religion,
and the press gave mass adierentresonanceintheUnitedStatesthaninEurope.As
awkward translations in Spanish, Chinese, and other languages attest, the term had
far less resonance elsewhere. English cognates were broadly adopted, in line with the
spreadofEnglishasagloballinguafranca.Intheprocess,theyoentookondierent
meanings than those that dominated in the United States (e.g. in France’s CECMAS).
2. Political and religious ideology.Mass communication was originally part of
the argot of American, free-market, liberal democracy. It resonated with the lib-
eral metanarrative of civilizational progress through new forms of communication,
which naturalized its discursive linkage to modernization initiatives. Adoption oen
articulated itself to visions of (U.S.-style, liberal) modernity (e.g. the Rockefeller
Foundation, UNESCO, occupied Japan, the Latin American Economic Commission).
Conversely, active rejection of the term was frequently embedded in competing
ideologies: cultural Marxism in Britain, a regionally identied Le in Venezuela,
Maoism in China, and Catholicism at the Vatican.
3. Local academic traditions. Adoption of the imported term depended in part
of the strength of local traditions of press research and an individual’s generational
place in them. In Germany, where Zeitungwissenscha had reorganized itself as Pub-
lizistikwissenscha, there was built-in resistance to the U.S. term and the behavioral
science that it indexed, which didn’t ease until the 1960s. In that context, younger
scholars who had less invested in the local tradition were more likely to adopt mass
communication.
4. Location within social networks. Early adopters of the term were oen partici-
pants in face-to-face communication, extended social networks, or invisible colleges
of scholars connected to U.S. sociology, social psychology, and/or communication
research. Conversely, many of those who resisted it were more distant and beneted
from social capital derived from other communities.
5. Particular rhetorical contexts. Beyond its conceptual power, mass communica-
tion did rhetorical work legitimating institutional and intellectual initiatives. It was
among the armaments of modernization theory, development projects in the Global
South, the reinvention of U.S. journalism education, a new German history journal,
andanewresearchcenterinParis.
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P. Simonson et al. Beginnings of Mass Communication
We believe this ve-fold matrix provides a template for investigating the transna-
tional movements of other key terms as well: for instance, the U.S.-born public
speaking and interpersonal,theGermanZeitungwissenscha and Öentlichkeit,and
the Latin communicatio socialis, all of which trail their own entangled histories. We
also note that, while our essay has covered a good deal of ground, it was silent
about vast regions, privileged exemplary vignettes across contexts more than deep
immersion in any particular one, and largely ignored the gendered and racialized
dimensions of the discourses we studied. Moreover, owing to space constraints, we
did not attend to the (partial) disappearance of the term, which is a subject for future
work. That said, we hope that our essay has helped to expand the collective imaginary
of the eld and the transnational discursive trails that helped constitute it, and
performatively made a case for greater historical reexivity about the terminologies,
concepts, and theories through which we inquire.
Notes
1We use “sign” in the Peircean (Peirce, 1895/1998) sense of the representation of
some object that issues in a further interpretant sign determining its meaning.
As our essay shows, mass communication is a sign that emerged to represent the
full array of modern mass media and the socio-symbolic processes that emanated
from them, and its meanings have been contested from almost its beginning. Sign,
in this sense, encompasses mass communication as both a linguistic term and
an animating concept. While our primary focus is on the transnational history
of the term, we also attend to its reconceptualizations and, thus, use sign here
intentionally.
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