Historian appropriately have recorded the nineteenth century as the age of that remarkable political, economic, and social transformation known as the Industrial Revolution. Even more appropriately, the most significant development of this century and the one likely to leave the most compelling impression on modern society has been trenchant growth of the mass media. The development of the communication art and consequent germination of public relations as a social technique have been unique phenomena of the present century. For this century have seen the perfecting art of mass communication, with variety of intricate and highly refined media and technique employed to convey information, entertainment, and education to a large, heterogeneous group known as public.
In a sense, the era of mass communication is a result of the absorbing interest in social and technical proficiency that grew out of the industrial upheavals of the previous century. Such devices as the telephone and telegraph were early scientific instruments of direct communication that subsequently sparked the invention of the more indirect social agencies such as the press, syndicate, radio, and television. But our concern here is not so much with the science of communication as with the mass communication and public relations as an art and a burgeoning profession, with the development and use the of the various mass media and their influence on public opinion formation in a democratic society.
It has become increasingly evident that the very values and judgments by which cotemporary man lives are closely connected with, and influenced by, the communication media and opinion influencing by, the communication media and opinion influencing technique. Mass media have become vital centers for transmission of knowledge, the dissemination of facts, and directing of various emotional appeals to the public opinion. Television, as envisaged by many educators, has an unusual potential for transmission knowledge. The press and the radio news programs are virtually unlimited sourced of information and facts. And technique of propaganda frequently is employed to direct emotional appeal to public in the hope channeling opinion formation toward a preconceive end or in favor of special interest.
It would have taken a personal harbinger, such as Paul Revere years, if not a lifetime, in convey a massage which can now reach about 170, 000, 000 persons in mater of minutes. Mass media, such as press syndicates, the radio, television, and motion pictures, has superseded the more direct person to person contact of the nineteenth century New England town meeting or the eighteen century coffee house. These communication media are indirect, intricate, and involved in their function, and they are equally indirect in their impact on the individual and the group. Although certain of the media, such as television, give the illusion of one person speaking to other, the media are mass media because they operate as a transmission belt of one or more persons speaking to many.
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