The Evolution of Communication Research: Influential Social Forces and Developmental Phases

Communication research as a formal academic discipline is barely a century old, yet it has already undergone dramatic transformations – shaped not by academic curiosity alone, but by wars, commercial interests, political pressures, and an anxious public trying to make sense of increasingly powerful media. To understand where the field stands today, you need to trace its origins through the forces that made it necessary in the first place. Four social forces in particular drove communication research into existence and gave it direction, and four developmental phases mark how the field matured over time.

The social forces that built communication research 🔗

Communication research did not emerge in a vacuum. It was compelled into being by real-world urgencies. Each of the four social forces discussed below pushed scholars, governments, and industries to ask questions they had never thought to ask before – about what media does, to whom, and with what consequences.

World War I and the discovery of propaganda’s power 🔗

World War I was a turning point in how media was perceived, studied, and feared. For the first time in history, governments systematically deployed mass media as an instrument of war. As historian Nick Fischer has documented, the United States government founded the Committee on Public Information (CPI) as an unprecedented propaganda machine to sell the war to a public that had overwhelmingly supported neutrality just months earlier. The CPI’s fourteen departments enlisted artists, filmmakers, journalists, and novelists to spread pro-war messaging through every available channel – print, film, posters, and live speeches delivered by a network of trained volunteers.

The need to secure public support for the war on all sides led to the development of modern war propaganda, borrowing techniques directly from marketing and public relations. The sheer effectiveness of these campaigns alarmed scholars and policymakers alike. The success of WWI propaganda led directly to the creation of the public relations industry, and the term “propaganda” – once a neutral descriptor – shifted into a word of abuse by the 1920s. Political scientist Harold Lasswell was among the first to study this systematically, famously framing the entire enterprise of communication research around a single question: Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect? The seeds of modern communication research were planted in the trenches.

The manufacturer’s and advertiser’s lobby 🔗

After World War I, the commercial world took notice of what propaganda had demonstrated: media could change minds at scale. World War I bond campaigns had made it clear that advertising could be used to influence public beliefs and values, and manufacturers were eager to apply these lessons to peacetime selling. By the 1920s, corporations were investing heavily in the new science of reaching consumers through radio and print. Radio became an accepted commercial medium during the 1920s, and as it entered people’s homes, advertising had become an integral aspect of programming. Agencies conducted surveys and researched prime time slots to better reach their target demographics.

This commercial push was a defining pressure on communication research. Administrative media studies – research designed to help use mass communications to influence audiences and sell products – became the dominant mode, with advertisers funding a new kind of inquiry focused entirely on audiences. Advertising research during the 1950s used scientifically driven techniques to attempt to influence consumer opinion, turning communication research into a tool of commerce as much as scholarship. Crucially, this shifted the field’s lens from a fearful focus on “what is media doing to us” toward a more operational question: “who is the audience, and how do we reach them?”

The publisher’s lobby 🔗

Newspaper and magazine publishers formed another powerful social force shaping the direction of communication research. Publishers had both a financial stake in understanding their audiences and a political interest in framing how media was regulated and perceived. The influence of advertisers and publishers’ fears of offending advertisers created subjects that few newspapers, magazines, or broadcasters would enter – effectively shaping what got researched and what got ignored.

Publishers were also invested in research that would demonstrate the value and reach of print media to advertisers, spurring investment in readership studies and circulation research. The result in the United States was a symbiotic relationship between media and advertising, where people relied on the mass media for information and entertainment, and media depended on audiences to attract advertisers. This mutual dependency made understanding the audience a commercial necessity, and publishers drove significant funding into what would later become formal audience research.

Public concern 🔗

The fourth social force was the public itself – and in particular, growing alarm about what mass media was doing to society. As television penetrated nearly every home by the late 1950s and 1960s, parents, educators, and legislators grew increasingly worried about the content being consumed, especially by children. If advertisers could use television to sell cereal, what else was it “selling” to young viewers? The effect of media on the public, especially on youth, has been an ongoing issue since the onset of mass communication – from early print media to music recordings to the growth of film, radio, and eventually the internet.

This public anxiety was not merely cultural hand-wringing. It translated into political pressure, government inquiries, and academic funding directed at studying media violence, sexual content, and social influence. Research born from public concern would eventually yield some of the field’s most enduring theoretical frameworks.

The four developmental phases of communication research 🔗

Alongside these social forces, the field evolved through four interlinked phases – each building on the previous one, and each reflecting the dominant concerns of its era.

Phase 1: Focus on the medium 🔗

The earliest phase of communication research was preoccupied with the medium itself – what it was, how it reached people, and what it was capable of. Scholars in this phase operated largely under what became known as the “hypodermic needle” or “bullet” theory: the idea that media messages were injected directly into a passive audience with powerful, uniform effects. This assumption, while later proven too simplistic, was not unreasonable given what WWI propaganda had seemingly demonstrated.

Research in this phase examined newspapers, radio, and film as technologies of mass influence. The central question was straightforward: does exposure to this medium change behavior? The assumption that it did – powerfully and directly – drove the field’s earliest empirical efforts. As researchers began studying the effects of media, they used suggestion theory to explain how people could be influenced by emotionally resonant persuasive messages. This phase established that studying communication was a legitimate scholarly enterprise and not merely a concern for politicians or advertisers.

Phase 2: Focus on uses and users 🔗

By the mid-twentieth century, the simplistic “bullet theory” was giving way to more nuanced inquiry. Researchers began asking not just what media does to people, but what people do with media. Who watches? Who reads? What are they looking for, and are different audiences affected differently? This shift was partly driven by the advertiser lobby’s very practical need to understand audience segments.

Commercial interests poured funding into audience and market research, moving the focus from a single, powerful “mass” to a collection of distinct publics or markets. Paul Lazarsfeld’s influential work at Columbia University challenged the hypodermic model by showing that media effects were mediated by interpersonal relationships – his “two-step flow” theory proposed that messages first reach opinion leaders, who then pass them along to the broader public. This phase introduced the concept of an active audience and fundamentally changed the field’s assumptions about how communication works.

Phase 3: Focus on social and psychological effects 🔗

The third phase dug deeper into the psychological and social consequences of media consumption – a direction driven heavily by public concern. With television now ubiquitous, researchers turned to questions of violence, attitude formation, political persuasion, and social conformity. This was arguably the most theoretically productive phase in the field’s history, producing frameworks that remain central today.

In the early 1970s, theories of cultivation and spiral of silence, introduced by George Gerbner and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann respectively, outlined a view of social-level media effects that were more powerful than what had been advocated by many theorists following Lazarsfeld’s widely accepted limited effects model. Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory argued that heavy television exposure gradually shapes viewers’ perceptions of social reality, making the world seem more dangerous and violent than it actually is. Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence theory proposed that individuals suppress minority opinions for fear of social isolation, with mass media playing a pivotal role in determining which opinions feel “safe” to express publicly.

This phase also produced agenda-setting theory, which demonstrated that media does not tell people what to think so much as what to think about – a subtler but equally powerful form of influence. Together, these theories moved communication research away from simple stimulus-response models toward a much richer understanding of how media interacts with individual psychology and social structure.

Phase 4: Focus on technological improvement and the digital turn 🔗

The fourth phase, still very much underway, is defined by the rapid transformation of communication technologies. Cable television, satellite broadcasting, the internet, social media, mobile communication, and now artificial intelligence have fundamentally altered the media landscape – and with it, the questions researchers are asking. The old assumption of a passive mass audience receiving messages from a handful of centralized sources no longer holds.

Media has evolved from traditional formats like print, radio, and television to include digital platforms like social media and blogs, significantly expanding its reach and accessibility. Researchers in this phase grapple with fragmentation, algorithmic curation, misinformation, participatory culture, and the blurring of producer and consumer roles. Questions about cultivation and spiral of silence, for instance, have been revisited in the context of digital media – where anonymity can embolden minority opinions and echo chambers can intensify partisan beliefs simultaneously. Methods have also evolved dramatically, with big data analytics, computational text analysis, and machine learning opening new frontiers for studying communication at scale.

Why this history matters 🔗

Tracing communication research through these social forces and developmental phases reveals something important: the field has never been purely academic. It has always been shaped by the world around it – by the urgency of wartime, the imperatives of commerce, the anxieties of ordinary people, and the opportunities created by new technologies. Each phase built on what came before and was pushed forward by social pressures rather than theory alone. The Great War transformed propaganda as, indeed, it transformed warfare – and in doing so, it created the intellectual conditions for an entire discipline. Understanding this history is not merely academic background; it is essential context for anyone who wants to critically evaluate the media landscape they inhabit today.

What do you think? Given that communication research has historically been funded and directed by commercial and political interests, how confident can we be in the “objectivity” of media effects research? And as social media continues to blur the line between media producer and consumer, do the four developmental phases of communication research still hold – or is it time to define a fifth?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_World_War_I
2. https://daily.jstor.org/the-us-propaganda-machine-of-world-war-i/
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/war-propaganda
4. https://oer.pressbooks.pub/mediacommunication/chapter/history-of-advertising/
5. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell6.htm
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/article/abs/pii/S0167268109001917
7. https://researchgate.net/publication/272494431_Advertising_History
8. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/media-influence
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
10. https://climateshiftproject.org/files/files/-societal-viewpoints_20a8ajuewm362zfm8x6jxe/
11. https://climateshiftproject.org/durable-paradigms-cultivation-and-spiral-of-silence-research-in-the-digital-age/
12. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-322-87749-9_2
13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/16161262.2022.2036498