Identity and Image in the Media

摘要

Careful observers of communication like Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book, Public Opinion, have long noted that communication products (newspapers for Lippmann; radio, film, television, and, later on, the digital world) shape people's understanding of the world. Since most of us can have direct experience of only a small part of the world, we depend upon what others tell us. Others who command large audiences such as those generated by the news and entertainment industries can have an impact beyond their individual reach. Lippmann's observation may have functioned as an "aha" moment for many; it coincided with early communication research and at least indirectly led scholars to examine the issue more closely. Harold Lasswell's classic 1927 study, Propaganda Technique in World War Ⅰ, took up the theme, focused on how governments aimed to shape public opinion, both in their own nations and in those of their enemies, often through mass media outlets. Advertising agencies had more or less reached the same conclusion from their applied work of getting products before the public, even if they did not have a good theory to explain their results or even target particular audiences.