Communication & Media Studies
Communication and media studies examine how humans create, transmit, interpret, and are affected by messages — through interpersonal interaction, organizations, and mass and digital media — and how media institutions shape culture and society.
Scope
The field spans interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication; journalism, media, and audience studies; political, health, and intercultural communication; rhetoric; and digital and new media, combining social-scientific, critical, and humanistic approaches.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How do messages produce meaning and effects?
- How do media shape public opinion, culture, and behaviour?
- Who controls media, and in whose interest?
- How does communication build and sustain relationships and organizations?
- How do new media technologies change communication?
Key concepts
- Sender-message-receiver
- Channel and noise
- Opinion leaders / two-step flow
- Agenda setting
- Framing
- Media effects
- The medium is the message
Key theories
- Transmission models of communication
- Lasswell's 'who says what to whom in what channel with what effect' and Shannon's mathematical theory framed early models of communication as message transmission.
- Limited effects and two-step flow
- Lazarsfeld and colleagues found media effects are often mediated by opinion leaders and social networks, tempering 'magic bullet' views.
- Persuasion research
- The Yale studies systematized the experimental study of source credibility, message, and audience in attitude change.
- Medium theory
- McLuhan argued 'the medium is the message' — that media forms themselves, more than their content, reshape perception and society.
History
Communication research emerged mid-twentieth century from propaganda analysis (Lasswell), information theory (Shannon), and empirical effects and persuasion studies (Lazarsfeld, Hovland). 'Limited effects' findings gave way from the 1970s to agenda-setting, cultivation, and framing theories, while critical and cultural-studies traditions and medium theory (McLuhan) broadened the field, now reshaped by digital and networked media.
Debates
- How powerful are the media?
- Views range from strong, direct media effects to 'limited effects' mediated by audiences and networks, with contemporary work emphasizing conditional and long-term effects.
- Content versus medium
- Scholars debate whether media influence stems mainly from message content or, as McLuhan argued, from the properties of the medium itself.
Key figures
- Harold Lasswell
- Claude Shannon
- Paul Lazarsfeld
- Carl Hovland
- Elihu Katz
- Marshall McLuhan
Related topics
Seminal works
- lasswell-1948
- shannon-1948
- lazarsfeld-1944
- katz-lazarsfeld-1955
- mcluhan-1964
Frequently asked questions
- Is media studies the same as communication?
- Media studies, focused on mass and digital media institutions and content, is a major part of the broader communication discipline, which also covers interpersonal and organizational communication.
- What is agenda-setting?
- The theory that media, by emphasizing certain issues, shape what the public considers important — 'the media may not tell us what to think, but what to think about'.