History of Communication

Michael Schudson
mscudson@ucsd.edu

This seminar is designed to introduce beginning graduate students to the intellectual history of communication research. This is a complex task in a department that seeks not to recapitulate mainstream American communication research but to extend it and criticize it. This department draws intellectual sustenance from some of the figures and traditions within conventional communication research but from others outside it, too. The seminar will try to provide a history of the "field" of communication as it is conventionally understood while weaving into it the alternative tradition that this department is trying to invent.

Required Texts:
Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, l96l)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso)
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, l989)
Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (Free Press, l956)
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Macmillan, l922)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, l962)

Schedule

Week I. Introduction

A. The Enlightenment and Its Legacy

Isaiah Berlin, "The Counter-Enlightenment" in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (Viking, l980) l-24.

B. Modernity and Its Discontents

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Part I)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (l904-5) (New York: Scribner's, l958) l3-l9, l80-l83
Georg Simmel, "Metropolis and Mental Life," in Kurt Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe: Free Press, l950) 409-424.

Supplemental Reading:

Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford U. Press, l953).

Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, l96l) ll-72.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (Basic, l978) l22-144
Hadley Cantril, "The Invasion from Mars" in Wilbur Schramm and Donald Roberts, Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Urbana; University of Illinois, l97l)

Supplemental Reading:

Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind (North Carolina, l982)

Donald Fleming, "Attitude: History of a Concept," Perspectives in American History 6 (l972)

Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, l98l)
Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, l975).

Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, l98l).

Gregory Bush, Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, l99l).

Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds: A Moving Picture of Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page, l9l3).

Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, l9l5, l965) pp. l3-33, 235-265.
Michael Cole, "The Cultural-Historical School" (manuscript)
George Herbert Mead, "Self" in George Herbert Mead, On Social Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l964) pp. l99-246.
Edward Sapir, "Language," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (l934)
Clifford Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," Interpretation of Cultures (Basic, l978) 33-54.

Supplemental Reading:

Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca: Cornell, l993).

Ruth Leys, "Mead's Voices: Imitation as Foundation; or, the Struggle Against Mimesis," in Dorothy Ross, ed. Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences l870-l930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, l994) 2l0 235. Also in Critical Inquiry l9 (Winter l993): 277-307.

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, l922).
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems
Jurgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere" in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds. Rethinking Popular Culture (Berkeley: U. of California Press, l99l) 398-404.

Supplemental Reading:

Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, l973)

Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, l99l).

Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, l980).

James T. Kloppenberg, "Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty," in Dorothy Ross, ed. Modernist Impulses..., pp. 69-90.

Richard Rorty, "Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin," in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses..., pp. 54-68.

Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, l958) l9-75.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, l983)
Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l98l) 234-260.
James Carey, "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan" in Raymond Rosenthal, ed. McLuhan: Pro and Con (Penguin Books, l969) 270-308.
Daniel Bell, "The Social Framework of the Information Society" in Michael Dertouzos and Joel Moses, eds. The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, l979) pp. 163-211.

Supplemental Reading:

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, l973)

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, l979).

David R. Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l994).

Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l977).

Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action," in Lyman Bryson, ed. The Communication of Ideas (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, l948, l964) pp. 95-ll8.
Wilbur Schramm, "How Communication Works" in Wilbur Schramm, ed. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, l954) 3-26.
Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss, "The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness," in Schramm, ed. 275-288.
Herta Herzog, "Motivations and Gratifications of Daily Serial Listeners" in Schramm, ed., 50-55.
Bernard Berelson, "What Missing the Newspaper Means," in Schramm, ed., 36-47.
Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (New York: Free Press, l955) 15-42, ll6-l33, l37-l43, l75-l86, 309-320.

Supplemental Reading:

Steven Chaffee and John L. Hochheimer, "The Beginning of Political Communication Research in the United States: Origins of the 'Limited Effects' Model," in Everett Rogers and Francis Balle, eds., The Media Revolution ion America and Western Europe (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, l982) pp. 263-283.
Willard Rowland, The Politics of TV Violence Research (Newbury Park: Sage, l983).

Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare l945-l960 (New York: Oxford University Press, l994).

Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir," in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds. The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America l930-l960 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l969) pp. 270-337.

Todd Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm" Theory and Society 6 (l978) 205-253.
Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communication and American Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, l97l) pp. 79-l07.
Elihu Katz, "Communications Research Since Lazarsfeld," Public Opinion Quarterly 5l (l987) S25-S45.
Theodor Adorno, "Stars Down to Earth," Telos l9 (Spring l974) l3-90.

Supplemental Readings:

Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, l994)

Peter Uwe Hohendahl, "The Frozen Imagination: Adorno's Theory of Mass Culture Revisited," Thesis Eleven 34 (l993) l7-4l.

Theodor Adorno, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America," in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., Intellectual Migration, 338-370.

Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Ibid., l28-l38.
Andrew Goodwin, "Introduction," in Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, l992) pp. xiii-xxxix.
John Fiske, "Television: Polysemy and Popularity," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (l986) 39l-408.

Supplemental Reading:

Dan Schiller, Theorizing Communication (New York: Oxford, l996).

A. Postmodern Experience

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, l989).

B. Postmodern Knowledge: Power/Knowledge

Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures" in Nicholas Dirks, et. al., Culture/Power/History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, l994) pp. 200-22l.
Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" in Dirks et. al., pp. 49-95.
Michael Schudson, "Paper Tigers," Lingua Franca (August, l997)

Supplemental Reading:

Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, l986).

Mark Poster, Modes of Information

Readings (if any) To Be Announced.

Other Background Readings:

Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, l984).
Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l98l).
Ithiel de Sola Pool, et. al. eds. Handbook of Communciation (Chicago: Rand McNally, l973)
International Encyclopedia of Communication

Written Assignments:

A grade for this course will be based on seminar participation and three written assignments, as follows:

l and 2. Analysis and commentary on two of the common readings, addressing the following questions, as appropriate, in 3-5 pages each:

a) What is the intention/audience/context of the writing?

b) What is the mood or tone of the writing and the self-presentation of the author?

c) What is the primary argument?

d) What is the best evidence for it?

e) What is the best argument against it?

f) What does this piece of writing contribute to the study of communication?

g) What is, to you, the most interesting point the author makes or question the author raises?

NOTE: These two papers are to be prepared in advance of the class at which we will discuss the book or article that is their topic. Students should photocopy their papers for each member of the seminar and make them available Tuesday afternoon before 4:30.

3. Final assignment: develop one of your first two papers into an 8-l0 page essay to be turned in during exam week. Your essay should focus on important issues raised in the seminar and should center on two or more texts read in common (but only one of the two you have previously written on). The paper may also reflect your reading in at least one substantial supplementary reading.