Communication was first born in the United States and is an emerging social science that only emerged in the 20th century.

As a very young discipline, communication studies has a history of only a hundred years.

But at the same time, the theoretical development in the field of communication has been advancing by leaps and bounds, mainly due to the fact that communication is an interdisciplinary subject: it is closely related to journalism, sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, political science, information theory, systems theory, etc.

Many other disciplines and majors are inextricably linked, and the mutual influence and mutual penetration between them make it develop very rapidly.

Out of curiosity about its development, I found this book to read.

I hope that by sorting out the milestones of communication research, I can understand the important theories in the development process of communication, and form a complete and clear development line of communication in my mind, so that it can effectively help me in my subsequent systematic study of communication.

Due to time constraints, I have only briefly sorted out the first five milestone events here, and only done a quick and superficial look at the remaining projects.

The book "Milestones of Mass Communication Effectiveness Research" mainly selects 14 research projects.

The selection criteria are as follows: 1. Whether it has great historical significance (including whether it has an original perspective and whether it can be regarded as a turning point in the development of disciplinary theory); 2. Whether the research method is quantitative research.

1. The magic bullet theory as a starting point The magic bullet theory is a theory that fears the power of mass communication.

The magic bullet theory believes that media audiences are irrational, and those who control the media can effectively control the public.

It is worth mentioning that the magic bullet theory was not one of the 14 milestone research projects, because the magic bullet theory was not systematically summarized as a theory at that time, but it provided a basic theoretical framework.

Under the guidance of this theoretical framework, empirical research on mass communication began.

2. Penn Foundation Research: The Impact of Movies on Children In the 1920s, the sudden involvement of the film industry caused people to raise many questions.

The content of movies in the 1920s was much the same as today, with less violence, gore and sex, but similar themes.

By the mid-20th century, the film industry was facing huge controversy over whether it had a huge negative impact on children.

(1) Peterson and Thurston: Movies and Attitude Change The purpose of Peterson and Thurston's series of experiments was to study the extent to which movies can change adolescent subjects' views on specific issues.

The overall strategy of the study was very straightforward, they used paired comparison scales to measure the specific attitudes addressed in the study.

On the one hand, they tested the ability of a single film to change attitudes in a series of 11 separate experiments.

The test's attitudes were toward the Germans, the war, gambling, Prohibition, the death penalty, criminals, and "niggers."

Some experiments show changes in the subjects' attitudes, while in other experiments no obvious attitude changes are seen.

On the other hand, there was a series of experiments in which subjects watched two or more movies on the same theme between tests.

For example, in one set of experiments, all the videos shown were sympathetic to the plight of criminals in prison.

The results showed that the attitudes of the subjects changed significantly.

Comprehensive research results: A single movie has little or no effect on changing attitudes; however, two or three movies on the same theme can make the subjects in the study change their attitudes significantly, moving closer to the views expressed in the movies.

(2) Blumer: Film and Behavior Blumer used qualitative research.

His investigation has a number of shortcomings, mostly caused by the criteria played and the quantitative analysis.

But his section may well be the most prominent of all the Penn Fund studies.

He asked the respondents to adopt the self-narrative mode in the early stage and describe the impact of all the movies they could recall on their past lives in as natural and candid a way as possible.

In the autographs he collected, Blumer found that movies did shape the patterns in which subjects thought about and interpreted various aspects of their lives.

3. Martian invasion: Radio plunged the United States into panic. In 1938, the radio drama "War of the Worlds" broadcast by CBS caused panic among many American people.

"War of the Worlds" uses a format that imitates live news reporting, describing a scripted story of a Martian invasion of Earth.

Although CBS interspersed the statement four times at the beginning, middle and end of the radio drama: This is a fictionalized radio drama and this is not a real radio drama, it still caused panic among a large number of American people.

The final outcome of this matter was: CBS issued a public apology, and the Federal Communications Commission held a hearing and proposed a solution - banning the use of "live" news reporting in broadcast dramas.