Communicatieklassiekers
Samenvatting en
aantekeningen
webcolleges
Premaster communicatiewetenschap
Vivian Jak
,Inhoud
Samenvatting module 1 .......................................................................................................................... 3
Compendium Communication Classics (2019) – Chapter 1 & 2 .......................................................... 3
The Structure of Foreign News – Galtung & Ruge (1965) ................................................................. 13
What is news? – Harcup & O’Neill (2017) ......................................................................................... 20
Samenvatting module 2 ........................................................................................................................ 27
The unique perspective of television and its effect: a pilot study – Lang & Lang (1953) ................. 27
The invasion from Mars: radio panics America – Lowery & deFleur (1995) ..................................... 31
Samenvatting module 3 ........................................................................................................................ 39
The people’s choice: The media in a political campaign – Lowery & deFleur (1995) ....................... 39
Personal influence: the two-step flow of communication – Lowery & deFleur (1995) .................... 47
Samenvatting module 4 ........................................................................................................................ 56
The project Gutenberg EBook of Public Opinion – Walter Lippmann (1922) ................................... 56
The agenda-setting function of mass media – McCombs & Shaw (1972) ........................................ 59
Mediatization and political agenda-setting: Changing issue priorities? – Van Aelst et al. (2014) .... 63
Samenvatting module 5 ........................................................................................................................ 69
Growing up with television: Cultivation processes – Morgan et al. (2009) ...................................... 69
Living with television – Gerbner & Gross (1976) ............................................................................... 75
Samenvatting module 6 ........................................................................................................................ 83
Mass media flow and differential growth in knowledge – Tichenor et al. (1970) ............................ 83
The knowledge-gap hypothesis – Tankard (2001) ............................................................................ 88
Samenvatting module 7 ........................................................................................................................ 96
Compendium Communication Classics (2019) – Chapter 7 .............................................................. 96
Structural balance: a generalization of Heider’s theory – Cartwright & Harary (1956) .................. 103
Cognitive dissonance theory: How communication research adapted the theory of cognitive
dissonance – Donsbach (2009) ........................................................................................................ 109
Samenvatting module 8 ...................................................................................................................... 115
Democracy in America – De Tocqueville (1835).............................................................................. 115
The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion – Noelle-Neumann (1974) .................................. 127
Exemplifying a dispositional approach to cross-cultural spiral of silence research: Fear of social
isolation and the inclination to self-censor – Matthes et al. (2012) ............................................... 130
Samenvatting module 9 ...................................................................................................................... 136
Uses of mass communication by the individual – Katz et al. (1974) ............................................... 136
Uses and gratifications theory – West & Turner (2004).................................................................. 145
Aantekeningen webcolleges................................................................................................................ 152
Webcollege 1 ................................................................................................................................... 152
,Webcollege 2 ................................................................................................................................... 157
Webcollege 3 ................................................................................................................................... 160
Webcollege 4 ................................................................................................................................... 164
Webcollege 5 ................................................................................................................................... 170
Webcollege 6 ................................................................................................................................... 174
Webcollege 7 ................................................................................................................................... 177
Webcollege 8 ................................................................................................................................... 185
Webcollege 9 ................................................................................................................................... 192
,Samenvatting module 1
Compendium Communication Classics (2019) – Chapter 1 & 2
1. Introduction
This introductory chapter provides a sketch of even older ideas about communication. It starts with a
distinguishing feature of our species of political animals or linguistic apes on which current, classic, and
even older ideas about communication rest: storytelling and story comprehension, enabled by human
language. Chapter two is devoted to new thoughts about communication that were inspired by new
uses of new media that were developed in the centuries before communication science became a
discipline. These once new media enabled new ways to communicate in everyday life, social affairs,
religion, science, politics and economics. They contributed to new uses, to new ways of organizing and
to new societal, political and economic systems.
Storytelling and story comprehension
Imagine that you are locked up in a dark elevator with a very tiny hole on one of its walls through which
a light beam comes that can be seen as a straight white beam towards a white point at the same height
on the opposite side of the wall. Imagine that the elevator would now fall down in a very deep elevator
shaft with an accelerated speed as a result of gravity. Since it takes a little while before the light beam
reaches the opposite wall, now the observer in the elevator would see not a straight light beam to the
opposite wall anymore, but a light beam that bends ever more upwards. This story makes us
understand that the acceleration in the speed of the observer due to gravity and the curvature of light
are intertwined. The story makes us understand that the curvature, or contraction, of space near the
light beam and the acceleration of the observer are also merely two sides of the same coin.
Both logic and new observations – for example new experimental designs – are essential in developing
variations on the same story. If a is true, then b must be true as well. If it is more easy to observe
whether b holds than whether a holds, then an experimental or observational setup could be designed
to check whether b holds.
This syllabus is not about physics, but about communication. The thought experiments in physics
merely elucidate how stories evoke imagination and story comprehension, which is at the heart of the
study of communication. Thought experiments in physics also point to the roles of logic, of new
versions of the story in different languages including the language of mathematics, and of new
observations, eventually in experimental settings. The thought experiments demonstrate the
remarkable fact that it’s not necessary, and with the current technologies even impossible, to have
seen or witnessed personally in some here-and-now a running clock standing still or a light beam
bending upwards.
Human language
Stories and story comprehension presuppose human language. We are linguistic apes who use
language to let ourselves and our audience transcend the here-and-now in four directions:
• Outwards to people and places elsewhere.
• Past-oriented towards the glorious deeds of ourselves, our group and our nation, and evil acts
of intruders and enemies.
• Future-oriented towards the most likely unfolding of various scenario’s (e.g. a light beam
bending up) without our intervention and towards means-ends scenario’s guiding the planned
coordination of our actions with those of others by means of our commandments, our dialogue
with others, and so on.
, • Inwards to thoughts about past, current, future, or imagined states of affairs, or to the past,
current, future or imagined acts and intentions of ourselves and others.
→ Our stories invite others to imagine what we said and to keep this in mind when planning their
reactions.
Speakers of a language share its semantics and its grammar. Provided that we are aware of the
semantic meaning of words like river, sleep, ideas, red, green, colourless and furious, any sentence
that combines these words in a grammatically correct way will prompt us to imagine a world in which
that sentence holds true. “The river turns red” may prompt us to imagine that presumably a bloody
slaughter took place.
Grammar is used to signal whether statements refer to the outward, the past, the inward, or the
future. The world’s language grammars differ from each other, but they have an ability in common to
signal, by means of the word sequence in a sentence, according to whose imagination (inward) which
subject did what (past-oriented predicate), is doing what (outward-oriented predicate) or is
considering to do what (future-oriented predicate) to whom or what (which object). Grammar
distinguishes language from a mere bag of words.
We are also political animals:
• The capacity of humans to coordinate their future actions enables them to be ruthlessly
violent, both towards other species and towards other human tribes. Our language enables
agreements to bring a lamb to the slaughter on the first Wednesday in November after feeding
the lamb until then, or to conceal the planned coordination of a future attack on enemies while
putting on a show of amiability (beminnelijkheid) before.
• We are political animals also for another reason. When listening to a story that emphasizes X,
often stories that suggest its antithesis X come to mind spontaneously. Stories about human
cruelty may prompt us to remember Isiah’s vision that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and
that the leopard shall lie down with a kid. Only by taking their scriptures and their language
from them, political animals will be deprived from their spontaneous antithetical associations.
Let’s take the writings of Julius Caesar (100bC-44bC) as an example. They suggest that he was proud
to have understood the psyche of two German tribes, which were labelled by Caesar as the Tencteri
and Usipetes, who had dared to cross the Rhine near Kessel in the Netherlands. When he saw how
bravely the Germans amidst their baggage wagons withstood his attacks, while having let their women
and children flee away according to their German code of honour, Caesar ordered his cavalry to go
after the wives and children, after which a part of the German men tried to rescue them, which made
it easy for Caesar’s troops to slaughter the remaining Germans or to drive them into the river, where
they perished, overcome by fear, fatigue and the violence of the stream. Caesar’s story enables us to
imagine the battlefield, his thoughts and his Roman pride. It enables us to imagine what the adagiums
veni, vidi, vici (ik kwam, ik zag en ik overwon) and divide et impera (verdeel en heers) meant.
2. New media, new uses, new thoughts
Human language enables stories and imagination beyond the here-and-now, but media are the
extensions of man to facilitate their dissemination. The tremendous influence of new media on new
societal uses and new ways of thinking was brought forward by one of the classic authors in
communication science, Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message is the now famous title of the
first chapter of the first part of one of his books.
Script
The art of writing entails a system of signs and symbols to imprint stories on stones, clay tablets,
papyrus or other durables. Characters of the script were pictorial, but abstract signs were added soon.
