Modern American culture has seen a proliferation of radio and television personalities associated with talk therapy and advice-giving within the last 20 years (Epstein Psychology Today 34:5 2001). The origin of radio psychology, however, is the late 1920’s, when radio began to air many promoters of psychology in the context of “public service” programming. Among these individuals were Louis Monash, Arthur Payne, and, perhaps most importantly, Joseph Jastrow. Traditionally-trained psychologists used the new medium of radio in the service of education and adjustment. This article surveys radio psychology, its personalities, and topics in the inter-war period and proposes the significant social support role that radio psychology played during the Great Depression, much as modern talk radio does today (Ricks 1984).

Models in communications studies from the 1940s and 1950s depicted mass communication as one-way traffic. Sender and recipient faced each other almost like two individuals, yet unknown to each other, sharing a stream of messages that carried unequivocal contents with detectable consequences. From this meagre beginning, many modifications were added and new theories developed in the ensuing six to seven decades. In the process, ‘senders’ have become complex organisations embedded in the power system of society, ‘messages’ have become a part of culture more generally and ‘the audience’ is situated within multiple cultural and social contexts. Models have become more interactive, but have they changed enough? Perhaps there is still a need for a review of the state of the art: of what we really know about personal and social communications and the white spaces on our maps.

Contrary to the prevailing view in media and cultural studies, philosopher John Dewey and journalist Walter Lippmann did not represent different schools of thought. They were not adversaries in a great public debate about the fate of the public in modern democracies in the 1920s. Rather, their exchange about the “phantom” public was reframed as a conflict in the early 1980s, a reframing which has achieved broad interdisciplinary acceptance even though its rests on a casual rhetorical trope, not historical documentation. The reframing provides a salutary but inaccurate origin story for American media and cultural studies, illustrates the hazards of relying on secondary interpretations of historical sources, and deflects attention away from realistic assessment of the problems confronting democracy today. Dismantling this disciplinary folklore is essential to the integrity of the emerging “new history” of media and communication.

This paper presents a personal history of one strand of W. Ross Ashby's many ideas: using information theory to analyse complex systems empirically. It starts with where I entered the evolution of the idea as one of his students, points out a problem that emerged as a consequence of generalising information measures from simple to complex systems, i.e. systems with many variables, shows how this problem was eventually solved, and ends with how his idea of decomposing complex systems into smaller interactions reappears in one of the most complex technologies of our time: cyberspace. While nobody could anticipate the complexities that developed since, Ashby's idea of understanding complex systems in terms of manageable interactions, which I call electronic artefacts, is actually practised today and cyberspace is again worth analysing in information theoretical terms.

The concept of mass goes back a long way to characterize a society that consists of people somehow connected by communication while, at the same time, also dispersed in space and essentially detached from one another. Mass has also been a pejorative for critics of modern capitalist society and its culture. In the years after World War II, this latter use of the term became the target of a broadside attack by several highly credentialed scholars, who questioned its value as an analytic tool. This paper, starting with Ferdinand Tönnies, offers a brief overview of both the origins of the concept of mass and its subsequent refinement by French, German, and American sociologists into the mid-1930s. Distinguishing between its ideological connotations and the analytic use of the term helps us to focus on the most general and persistent effects of mass communication: expanding the range of common experience and making people more responsive to distant events. This effect is magnified by the ubiquity of mass media; practically no one, not even those who scorn them, can altogether escape their influence.

The division of the communication discipline according to whether people communicate face-to-face or via a technological medium has shaped the field’s development from the outset. The divide has been institutionalized over time in the structures of academic departments and schools, professional training and degrees, scholarly societies and publishing, and in the field’s larger research agendas. However, critics inside and outside the field have long insisted that the differences between the two subfields actually obscure the shifting, contingent nature of communication in everyday experience, social formations, and culture. This paper traces efforts to theorize the intersection of interpersonal and media communication, and in particular the concept of mediation, from Lazarsfeld and Katz’s two-step flow in the 1950s, to the challenge of digital media technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, to the rise of new media studies and digital culture scholarship from the 1990s onward.

In the Nordic region the field of media and communication research has appeared fairly coherent despite the underlying broad interdisciplinarity. The reasons can partly be found in the support of biennial regional conferences, national research associations, and the Nordicom documentation centre. A similar relationship between interdisciplinarity and infrastructure can be studied at the single university performing research in this area. The case is the author’s home base at the University of Oslo. Units and networks of media and communication research are analyzed as ‘activity systems’. To what extent can the concepts of ‘mediation’ and ‘knotworking’ in ‘activity theory’ be useful in analyses of interdisciplinarity and infrastructure of media and communication research? How would this apply on a European level?

The terms of (mass) communication research and media studies are widely used to refer to an academic discipline, usually established in universities as a major or minor subject, a department or institute and sometimes even a school or college. It is implied that this young field is by now a discipline in its own right alongside such traditional disciplines as history, literature, sociology or political science. However, the nature of the discipline often remains unclear, while its identity is typically determined by administrative convenience and market demand rather than analysis of its historical development and scholarly position within the system of arts and sciences. This chapter discusses the nature and terminology of the discipline, with examples of Finland and other Nordic countries, and it advocates the need for a continuous self-assessment of the research community.

In the past twenty-five years, the literature on consumption has gained analytic power by positioning itself against the consumer critics of the twentieth century (Veblen, Adorno and Horkheimer, Galbraith, Baudrillard), arguing that these accounts were totalizing, theorized consumers as too passive, and simplified motives. The literature moved to micro-level, interpretive studies that are often depoliticized and lack a critical approach to the subject matter. The author argues that developments such as the emergence of a global production system, ecological degradation, and new findings on well-being warrant a reengagement with the critical tradition and macro-level critiques. This article considers three traditions—Veblenian accounts of status seeking, the Frankfurt School, and Galbraith and the economic approach to consumer demand— arguing that the flaws of these models are not necessarily fatal and that the debate about producer versus consumer sovereignty should be revisited in light of the changing political power of transnational corporations.

Twenty-six years after the Journal of Communication published a special issue entitled "Ferment in the Field,” Professors Todd Gitlin, Jostein Gripsrud and Michael Schudson reflect on the state of the field of media and communications research. They discuss the conflict between critical and administrative research, the role of the intellectual in today’s society, and the quality of current research on new media.

In 1946, at the age of 38, Frank Stanton was named President of CBS. While much of Stanton's work as a corporate executive has been chronicled, his accomplishments as one of America's earliest scholars of radio audience measurement remain neglected in media scholarship. This article reviews Stanton's research efforts between 1933 and 1942, and in doing so it places his work within the contexts of contemporaneous social and psychological media inquiry. Discussions of Stanton's methodological approach, his innovative dissertation, his scholarship, and his collaboration with key figures in the history of communication research are informed by primary and secondary sources.

This article situates the emergence of the field of memory studies in relation to several areas of study: cultural studies, media studies, communication and visual culture. It considers key concepts of those fields — memory practices, technologies of memory, mediation and consumerism — in relation to memory studies. Finally, it reflects on some cautionary aspects of memory studies as it moves forward as a field of study.

By conducting a citation analysis of bibliographic references in combination with a network analysis of cocitation referencing in 56 journal publications in the area of agenda-setting research from 1996 to 2005, this paper aims to identify current exemplary publications and authoritative works in the knowledge production and dissemination process and to examine the nature of knowledge-sharing networks among the community of scholars who contribute to the growth of common knowledge in the study of agenda setting. The findings shed light on the intellectual history of agenda-setting scholarship and offer insight on subspecialties and intellectual linkages among key literature in this vigorous and ever-evolving field of inquiry.