TY - JOUR
AU1 - Simonson,, Peter
AU2 - Morooka,, Junya
AU3 - Xiong,, Bingjuan
AU4 - Bedsole,, Nathan
AB - Abstract 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 efforts to globalize the field, we offer 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, and rejection across world regions, we offer a methodology and a historical narrative to shed light on the early globalization of the field and lines of power and resistance that shaped it. We show how the term carries a residue of postwar American hegemony, and argue for greater reflexive awareness of our vocabularies of inquiry. At the turn of this century, an essay appeared with the provocative title, “The End of Mass Communication?” (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001). Its lead author, Steven Chaffee, was one of the leading mass communication researchers of his generation and had studied with the man who led the way in institutionalizing the field, 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 demassified media environment,” and that mass communication theory would need to be revised for the new age (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001, pp. 365, 374; cf. Turow, 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; Perloff, 2015). The debate variably addresses the term itself, the concept it signifies, 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 field 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 studies by showing how a term that originated in U.S. media industries entered the universalizing discourses of mid-century American social science and spread globally in the postwar era; (c) to advance a distinctive methodology for investigating fields 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. Key terms index concepts and broader ways of conceiving social worlds. They are 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, which was one of the central terms around which the field 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), who unpacked its meanings during the creation of a mass communications history collection in the 1950s; and Liu (2013) and Lin and Nerone (2016), who excavated its early translations in China. We significantly 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 efforts to investigate the transnational 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 efforts to tell more entangled, transnational histories of the field (Löblich & Averbeck-Lietz, 2016). Methodologically, our effort is, in some ways, reminiscent of Raymond Williams’ (1976) keywords project, but offers a more finely 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 social groups used them, along with when, where and how they did so”; and (b) their “paths of diffusion, i.e. [their] reception and subsequent evolution, changing meanings, dissemination, or disappearance” (Camic, 2011, p. 166). The method informed a vein of Robert K. Merton’s work, and we adopt a name that he considered for it, sociological rhetoric, to signal our attention to terms as at once indices of significant 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 disciplines as constituted around a specific 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 differentiated communities of inquiry, and institutions organize themselves. Central terms like mass communication have situated our field among other academic disciplines and participated in the broader geopolitical dynamics of the last century. More generally, a sociological 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 field 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 intellectual discourses in which academics played a part: our way of recognizing that academic fields 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 find; (b) significant early usages of the term that contributed to patterns of institutionalization or rejection in different national contexts, with a determination made on the basis of an individual’s or organization’s prominence in the extant historiography of the field; 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, WorldCat, 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, Scientific, 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 significant vectors of the term’s global history. The cases are not exhaustive, nor could they be within the limits of an article and our own 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), five 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 initiatives 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 field and related institutions. We argue that mass communication, in its cultural origins, was a distinctly American term, albeit one influentially adopted by a blend of native-born and émigré scholars. Its postwar dissemination reflected U.S. geopolitical hegemony and its correlate in U.S. social science. That influence was felt within UNESCO, where the American introduction of the term was at once controversial and reflective 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 five more specific factors that structured patterns of reception across our cases: (a) cultural and linguistic resonance of a term 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 One could argue that only in the United States could mass 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, inflected 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 differences 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 first case signaling a low, ignorant, and unstable multitude; and in the second a potentially revolutionary group in social solidarity against “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 created a different, more populist semantic space neither elitist nor revolutionary. 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). Newspaperman Walt Whitman’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 efforts to legitimatize 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 a relatively favorable alternative to other descriptions of newer media. Commercially driven national radio networks were not examples of “chain broadcasting” or “monopolies of the air,” as their critics asserted. They were forms of mass communication, 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, often advanced by individuals with ties to the radio industry. For instance, Herman Hettinger (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 figures 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 different sense. Soon Willey too would adopt the term mass communication, though in a different and more critical sense: perhaps the first of many redefinitions of the term. By the mid-1930s, there were clear signs that mass communication was undergoing 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 environment” that created “new problems whose significance 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 officer, John Marshall (1939) conceived the group as a means to develop more “systematic and disciplined” research “in a field which for a lack of a better name I have come to call mass communications.” The term fit the institutional purposes 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 uplift (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 effects” (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, effects-based media research that was broadly reflective of a transmission view of mass communication. In the 1940s, influential U.S. social scientists adopted the term mass communication, 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 Office of War Information and the Library of Congress that included Lasswell, 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 Office of War Information cohort (Cartier, 1988). As Director of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism, he operated in a different 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 first 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 field through a series of readers and textbooks, beginning with Mass Communications (Schramm, 1960, first 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 efforts of the Cold War, where the term helped signal the potential power of the technologies (Simpson, 1994) and fed 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 after the war, in no small part due to UNESCO, the single most important institutional locus of its global dissemination, and a site of contestation about the term’s meaning and place. The term entered UNESCO through U.S. efforts, 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 affinity 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 Office 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 communication resonated ideologically with the classic, liberal free flow 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 significant influence in the London planning meetings of late 1945 (Cowell, 1966). MacLeish drafted the eloquent preamble for UNESCO’s constitution that tellingly opened, “[si]nce wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed” (United Nations Educational, Scientific, 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 identified in its acronym, to “Media of Mass Communication.” It asserted the “paramount importance [of mass communication] … 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, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1945b, p. 68). The U.S. resolution was successful, and mass communication entered Article I of UNESCO’s constitution as the first-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 organization’s early years (Wisselgren, 2017). The organization oriented itself toward broader populations: “the masses of common people” and “the needs and the mentality 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 site of struggle. Consonant with the swirling utopian currents, members of the U.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 frequency, a new dimension, transcending and penetrating purely economic and political frontiers” to establish contact among peoples and effect their desire to find 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 communication as a “technological revolution” that justified “a new idealism, a new faith” in reason and science, and “goodwill and understanding among the nations” (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1946–47, pp. 519, 522, 539). Much to their surprise, the U.S. delegation experienced “considerable, and … unanticipated, hostility” to their efforts to incorporate mass communication into the heart of UNESCO’s mission. There was skepticism about using mass media for international understanding and worries that American media industries would promote “cultural imperialism” (United States Delegation to the First General Conference of United Nations Educational, Scientific, 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 different issues. Mass communication obfuscated these differences and invited critical questions about “who 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 definitely undesirable,” went on, urging UNESCO not confuse, “under the expression ‘mass communication,’ pure information with propaganda.” The so-called free flow 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 efforts to advocate the free flow of communications in general. Mass communication was institutionalized in and disseminated through UNESCO, but the term didn’t always translate easily. While the French communication de masse and the Spanish comunicación de masas made sporadic appearances, UNESCO generally used information and información in their official discourses. These terms avoided the difficulties 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 after 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 find a nation where the term was taken up more energetically than Japan. Geopolitics was a major driver. Led by the Americans, Allied Forces occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952. The Civil Information and Education Division of the occupation undertook a radical transformation of Japanese 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 Zeitungwissenschaft, newspaper science (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. 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 Shisō no Kagaku (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 field 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 communication, which he translated as taishū (the masses) dentatsu (transmission). That term didn’t stick, nor did the term used to translate the UNESCO constitution, taishū tsūhō (literally, reporting information to the masses). By 1950, the loan word masu komyunikēshon began to appear, and a year later Iguchi published Masu Komyunikēshon, the first Japanese book to use the term in its title. In 1954, 2 years after the end of occupation, Minami published Kōza Masu Komyunikēshon (Contemporary Mass Communication) and Schramm’s edited volume, Mass Communications, 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-influenced tradition of press science and defenders of the authoritarian regime. Particularly noteworthy were Eizō Koyama and Keizō Yoneyama. Both were trained in Japanese Zeitungwissenschaft and both served in government roles during the war (Kushner, 2006; Schäfer, 2012). After 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 field (Ikuta, 2007; Sato, 2017). Still, other scholars trained in the Zeitungswissenschaft tradition were critical of the American approach into the early 1950s and maintained allegiance to shinbungaku (newspaper studies), which expanded to designate a broader field 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 first issue of the society’s journal. It was only after the introduction of television broadcasting in 1953 and the fuller embrace of U.S. theories that the trend shifted 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 met stronger resistance in China, in the forms of political ideology, culture, and language. Mao Zedung’s victory in China’s Communist Revolution (1945–1949) brought a decisive halt to earlier affinities toward Western liberalism. In its different 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 (diffusion), and jiao tong (transportation; Liu, 2014). After the revolution, the situation was different. 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 alternatives. The tale of mass communication in China in the 1950s runs through two differently 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 staffed 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, after Mao encouraged criticism of the party line (“let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend”), Wang began publishing Journalism Translation Series, a journal that introduced contemporary Western theories into China. With linguistic difficulties, 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 finally 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 reflected 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 flowers” 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 different moment of opening toward the West. Western Europe Across Europe, there were variably established traditions of press studies that reorganized themselves after the war’s disruptions. Typically humanistic and with a strong historical bent, European press studies had their strongest expression in German Zeitungwissenschaft, influential 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, Publizistikwissenschaft, which cast general attention on public phenomena and took a practical focus that linked scholars and media professionals (Wiedemann, 2016). The tradition of press science—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 often tied to it. But the story was complex and depended on locations within social networks and generational position, among other factors. One key figure mediating contact between European press science and U.S. mass communication research was Kurt Baschwitz. A Jewish German who fled 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 Zeitungwissenschaft, he was involved with UNESCO from its early days and was a founding member of 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 refigured European press science reflecting the knowledge and challenges of the age: a “science of the press and mass psychology” (quoted in Wieten, 2005, p. 525). His identification reflected 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 field. Revision, not rejection, was the order of the day. These efforts gained tangible form in the Gazette, arguably the most important European media journal of the immediate postwar era, which Baschwitz founded in 1955. As he wrote in its first 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 film (Baschwitz, 1955, p. 1). In the U.S. context, mass communication encompassed all of these subjects, and mass communication research was the new field 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 official journal of the IAMCR, it adopted a new subtitle that reflected that institutional affiliation, International Journal for Mass Communications Studies: the first scholarly journal that would 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 European press science and find points of contact with mass communication research, the lines in Germany were less permeable. Among scholars studying public communication, Massenkommunikation was a term signaling positivist, American-style, empirical social scientific research (M. Meyen, 23 May 2014, personal communication). Members of the Frankfurt School, for instance, rarely used it, taking Massenkultur 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 undergraduate 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 figure mediating U.S. and German social psychology. Maletzke (1954a, 1954b) advanced this blended style in articles for the Institut’s journal, applying the communication paradigm prevalent in U.S. social psychology to the study of Publizistik. This meant embracing Massenkommunikation, conceived in the U.S. manner as a covering term for newspapers, mass print, film, radio, and television. It gave him a spacious concept/term that both marked off media communication as a domain for social psychology and provided a young researcher with a mode for distinguishing himself within Publizistik. After a trip to the United 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 Publizistikwissenschaft to a U.S.-style Kommunikationswissenschaft (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 significantly, 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 sociologist E.W. Hofstee (1958, p. 510) gestured toward modernization in an article on differing mortality rates across regions in the Netherlands that identified modern means of massa-communicatie as a key force that had transformed life in the 20th century. German historian Hans Rothfels, recently back from a decade of exile to the United States and a 5-year professorship at the University of Chicago, launched a new journal, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Contemporary History Quarterly). He announced in his inaugural editorial that modern means of “propaganda und massenkommunikation” underwrote its mission and the methodological 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 first time, allowed humans to recognize the different modes through which the external world makes itself present to consciousness. 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 different meaning than in the United States and those countries that followed its lead. The term of art in the Francophone world was information, which was also used across many Spanish-speaking countries. In Francophone Africa and the Middle East, the field developed as Information and generally remains that way (Ayish, 2016). Moles adopted the American term idiosyncratically. In 1960, however, at the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the sociologist-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 intellectually 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 profile, 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 different sense than Americans typically used it. The opening editorial for its new journal admitted that communication de masse was unsatisfactory but, “for lack of an alternative” they adopted it because it covered “press, radio broadcasting, television, cinema, publicity,” which together “constitute a unique reality of our century” (Centre d’ Êtudes des Communications de Masse, 1961, p. 1, trans.). Though Communications 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 environment” 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 afforded 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 Left, 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, fickle, 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 identifications, attunement to the cultural grammar of keywords, and distance from American sociology. His rejection, famously captured in the saying that there are no masses, only ways of seeing others as masses, set the 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 recreational 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 off 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 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 was at once a social scientist identifying with the invisible college of communication researchers he cited; a participant in public worries about mass society, modernization, and the so-called Americanization of the United Kingdom; and a sympathetic interlocutor with Catholic and New Left critiques of the commercialization and ownership of media industries. Mass communication was part of these identifications, 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 several factors. One was its geopolitical proximity to the United States and the Cold War politics of the 1950s and ‘60s. Related were international development efforts connected to the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Ford Foundation, and U.S. government agencies. In turn, regional traditions of left-leaning thought provided resources for resistance, while the Catholic Church introduced a significant alternative discourse. Finally, there was the difficulty of translating the term into Spanish: UNESCO officially used información, but through the 1960s, translations were unstable. We found comunicación de masas, comunicación de las masas, comunicación con las masas, comunicación masiva, and comunicación colectiva, with individual texts sometimes using multiple terms. Perhaps most significant were the ideological orientations, social networks, and rhetorical exigencies caught up in modernization initiatives and the flows of discourse, print matter, and people around them. These flows traveled in multiple directions, but from the North came streams of social scientific 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 research in Latin America through international seminars, publications, and formal recommendations (Mellado Ruiz, 2010). Occupying a complex institutional space among regional efforts to professionalize journalism 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 influential 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 journalism [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 Ciencia de la Información 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, Scientific, 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 field” (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1961, p. 15). His was one among many voices advocating that so-called underdeveloped peoples be brought into the modern age by using modern media to disseminate scientifically 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 efforts at social and economic development (Economic Commission for Latin America, 1961, p. 11). After 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 efforts to cultivate a professionalized journalism of objectivity in the American model. Both drew harnessed, centralized channels of mass communication to promote liberal modernization and free-market capitalism (Lugo-Ocando, 2018). Others in Latin America were instead inspired by the Cuban Revolution and drew upon regional traditions of left 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 film 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 School of Journalism had embraced American paradigms, but afterward it pursued regional identifications and left-democratic politics. Philosophically, Pasquali was attuned to media as socially embedded ways of seeing the world with strong ethical 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 flagrant 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, a theological term of art 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 Mirifica (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 influence, not only individuals, but the very masses and the whole of human society” (Pope Paul VI, 1963). The preparatory commissions for Inter Mirifica 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 pessimistic, suggesting a massification 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. Officially introduced in 1963, communicatio socialis resonated particularly strongly in Latin America, where mass communication never sat well linguistically, and communication 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 official language in the 1970s, christening the organization La Asociación Internacional 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 translated and incorporated into other cultural contexts around the world. Advanced initially by American capitalism, universalizing American social science, and forward-looking American or American-influenced institutions of cultural reform, mass communication was born into worlds not inclined to either historical reflection or reflexive awareness of cultural particularity. These qualities arguably still characterize reflections 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 field and the more robustly globalized community of inquiry straining to be born. Our essay has tried to reinscribe both historicity and cultural specificity to the now century-long discourse of mass communication. In the process, we’ve offered a new chapter in the global history of the field, driven methodologically by a transnational, sociological rhetoric of this key term. Substantively, we have illuminated entanglements of culture, geopolitics, and social networks that shaped early efforts to conceptualize and name media as a collective phenomenon and constitute a new field of study. Attuned to cultural contexts of origin, pathways of diffusion, 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 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 field. In the process, we drew attention to a number of competing terms indexed to different models of media inquiry and practice, and advanced by different assemblages of culture, institutions, and social collectives: xuanchan, information, Publizistik, and comunicación social, among others. While American power and postwar hegemony provide a broad explanation for the global dissemination of mass communication, we tried to show how five factors shaped reception of the term: 1. Cultural and linguistic resonance. Traditions of popular democracy, religion, and the press gave mass a different resonance in the United States than in Europe. 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 spread of English as a global lingua franca. In the process, they often took on different 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 liberal metanarrative of civilizational progress through new forms of communication, which naturalized its discursive linkage to modernization initiatives. Adoption often 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 identified Left 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 Zeitungwissenschaft had reorganized itself as Publizistikwissenschaft, 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 often participants 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 benefited from social capital derived from other communities. 5. Particular rhetorical contexts. Beyond its conceptual power, mass communication 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, and a new research center in Paris. We believe this five-fold matrix provides a template for investigating the transnational movements of other key terms as well: for instance, the U.S.-born public speaking and interpersonal, the German Zeitungwissenschaft and Öffentlichkeit, 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 field and the transnational discursive trails that helped constitute it, and performatively made a case for greater historical reflexivity about the terminologies, concepts, and theories through which we inquire. Footnotes 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. References Averbeck , S. ( 2008 ). 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TI - The Beginnings of Mass Communication: A Transnational History
JF - Journal of Communication
DO - 10.1093/joc/jqz027
DA - 2019-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-beginnings-of-mass-communication-a-transnational-history-bQ3cvZQS9A
SP - 518
VL - 69
IS - 5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -