Mass Communication as Public Communication

by James C . Stappers

Acts of communication in which knowledge is made available without restricting who may receive it constitute public communication, and it is the public digusion of this knowledge that should be the object of our study.
One of1he major obstacles that mass communications research has had to overcome is problems with its very name-mass communications. The term has been useful in capturing the attention of researchers in other fields and the general population, but has obscured the importance and development of models of the communications process not derived from the sender-receiver formulation. As Edelstein implied as early i t s 1966, Undoubtedly the greatest misapprehension is incorporated in the phrase the cqfects of muss communication, (2, p. 115). Not only has effects proved to be a troublesome issue, but the notion of mass as related to communication has been conftising and difficult to define. Indeed, it is hard to understand why the word has found its way into the languages of Europe: Massenkommunikation in German, Communication cle masse in French. The French particularly disliked the communication part of the expression, because for them it denotes the result of a process, rather than the process itself. Even the Americans did not really like it; although they may have been certain about what communicating is, they were not so sure as to what part or aspect should be called communication. Many authors thus distinguish between communication on one hand and true or real or accurate communication on the other hand. The French preferred the term
James G . Stappers is Professor at t h e Institute for Mass Communication, Catholic University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1983

information, and to some extent still do, as for instance in Association Internationale des Etudes et Recherches sur 1Information (AIERI), which elsewhere is called International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR). It seems that no one has liked the word mass ever since LeBon coined the word; it has become associated with a somewhat indiscriminate agglomerate of people of low morality, responsibility, and intelligence. Nevertheless, mass communication was introduced after World War 11, along with other Americanisms like Coca-Cola and 7-Up, and accepted as a technical term. But the unfamiliar, strange, and somewhat contradictory term impeded recognition that the term in fact covered a phenomenon already well known under other names. By 1960, Klapper could write: Twenty years ago, writers who undertook to discuss mass communication typically felt obliged to define that then unfamiliar term (5, p. 1).He himself shows no such feelings of obligation, as if the familiarity with the term had itself solved the problem.

The fact that the continental Europeans did not use the term mass communication does not imply that they were unfamiliar with the phenomenon.
By the late 1920s, there was already a solid tradition of studying not only the press, but also other media such as film and radio, as well as other forms ofpublic expression. Scholars in this period realized that the study of public communication, born at the crossroads of several disciplines and nurtured by many of those sciences, was and needed to be a discipline in its own right (8, p. 126). Contemporary students of literature and art who are discovering media-science-as, for example, Williams (9) seems to be doing-are, according to Lerg (7, p. 24), epistemologically at the level of the Zeitungswissenschaft of 1925. The common element of all those phenomena that Zeitungswissenschuft (later PublizistikwisserischcLft) was studying was public communication. This term implied more than merely the activities of the mass media. Because public communic at ion is public in the sense of excluding no one from its messages, it follows that any number of people can become receivers; such a group of people >, may or may not be called a mass, depending on the circumstances. There are obviously more listeners for a popular radio program at 8 P.M. than for a serious radio program at 11:30 P.M., but these groups need not be labeled differently; they should both be objects of study by the same discipline. For all practical purposes, then, mass communication can be considered equivalent to public communication. Whatever differences exist between the two may be relevant for telecommunications engineering, but not for a social science.

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Mass Communication as Public Communication

In the U.S. literature, the term mass communication is used either as an equivalent of public communication or as a name for those forms of public communication that take place through the use of so-called mass media, which are special technical means that make it possible to reach large numbers of people with identical messages almost simultaneously. It seems to be extremely difficult to formulate a definition of mass media independent of mass communication; in any case, when something becomes public knowledge, the technical means through which that occurred are relatively unimportant. Several authors, mainly American, consider the mass media to be a necessary condition for mass conimunication. There are, however, other ways of restricting the term mass communication. Wiebe wrote that, when we speak of a mass audience, we refer not to thousands or hundreds of thousands, but to millions of people in the United States. Thus, many communications often spoken of as mass communication are excluded from our discussion (4, pp. 160161).Given the size of the nations-and the language areas-we would exclude practically all European newspapers, to take just one example, from the category of mass media if we did not consider hundreds of thousands to constitute a mass. Of course, such a drastic definition does not hold even for the United States. As Wiebe remarks a few pages
I

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1983

later, mass communications are the nations shared experiences (4, p. 266). Hence we need not restrict oiirselves to the study of those items shared b y the millions; if they have been made public, they have been made available to the millions even if not necessarily shared by them. All information that has become public, either through formal media (6, p. 51) or through informal mass communication ( l ) becomes , integrated into the same body of common knowledge. Thus, all public communication can be seen and studied as one interdependent whole. Research on rumors, gossip, grapevines, and other informal and interpersonal communication has clearly shown that these are extensions, surrogates, complements, corrections, or competitors for the media. They should be regarded as informal public communication, or informal mass communication, because they serve to make public information that was carried by the media or could, might, or should have been, depending on the public. All these forms are efforts to build up a body of public information, in which anybody can share-at one moment as a producer of messages, at the next moment as a consumer-and they have much in common with the institutionalized media and with graffiti, samizdats, underground papers, and pirate radio stations.

The object of the study of mass communication is public-making, not just public-making through the so-called mass media.

The word public in the European context has at least three meanings: a public, an amorphous social structure; public as a quality of information, the awareness that it is known to many and commonly known that it is known to many ( 3 ,pp. 139-140); and public in the sense of the collective knowledge of many, which may or may not lead to action. The difference between the second and third meanings might be considered akin to the difference between an adverb (public communication = publicly communicating) and an adjective (public knowledge, public sphere). This threefold meaning is expressed most clearly in the German word Offentlichkeit, which incorporates all three meanings-a public, the quality of being public, and the public sphere. Mass communication is public communication-such acts of communication in which knowledge (information, attitudes, ideas, feelings) is made available without restricting who may be the receiver. Once a first step has been made without restriction, it is pointless to restrict subsequent steps. Even if the initial medium has been a small one, the information can be picked up by another, or by several others, and no one can stop the spread of information. What the media do is simply make something publicly available; for that something to become publicly known requires some action on the part of the public. Therefore, the main questions for a science of mass communication are: how

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Mass Communication as Puhlic Communication

do things get generally known; why art: they or why are they not generally known; when are they and when are they not generally known. In attempting to answer these questions, researchers have generally studied the media-the major niedia, that is, the ones whose m reach the majiority of the people, or eventually the majority ofthe people in a given area. Social scientists thus are aligiied with the propagandist, the advertiser, the seller of information. What they should study, however, is how and why information become generally availalo.le, how and why people spread the newly acquired knowledge, how and why they share the information. It is people, not the niedia, who play the important part in the diffusion of information. The piililic milst be put back in mass cornmunicatioiis research, not only in the sense of finding out what people do with the media, hiit in the sense of attempting to understand the problems of the diffusion of information or put)lic knowledge. If the diffusion of common knowledge necessary to solve our common proLlems is our object ofstitdy, we should begin our study with those who are doing the sharing of that iiiforrnation. New media have always commanded the most attention (i.e., the most research money) l>ecanse they are iiivarialily suspected of being the most powerful agents in the creation of public conscio~~snessprobably because the old media have invariably proven to be less effective than was hoped-or feared. Powerful interests are presently behind the new media, promoting their introduction and most likely ensuring their success. This can only increase the likelihood of fiinds being made available for studying new media rather than the role of people in making relevant information public.
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