 Personal Influence and the New Paradigm: Some Inadvertent ConsequencesKurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2006, vol. 608, issue 1, 157-178 Abstract: An examination of the reception given Personal Influence when first published points to highly selective interpretations of the findings. The claims reviewers made for the influence of interpersonal communication relative to the mass media, especially in the political process, went even beyond those advanced by the authors. They overlooked not only the very restricted conceptualization of “effects†that guided the Decatur research but also previously accumulated evidence on multiple kinds of media influence. This article argues that the new conventional wisdom pitting personal versus mass media effects associated with this and previous studies in the Columbia tradition discouraged, however inadvertently, a coming generation of sociologists from researching the effects—particularly long-range effects—of mass communication. As a consequence, academic sociology came to cede much of the high ground it once occupied in media studies to political science and to more professionally oriented departments or schools of communication. Keywords: mass media effects; interpersonal communication; concept of mass (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:608:y:2006:i:1:p:157-178 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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