1、1The structure and function of communication in societyHarold D.LasswellThe act of communicationConvenient way to describe an act of communication is to answer the following questions: WhoSays WhatIn Which ChannelTo WhomWith What Effect?The scientific study of the process of communication tends to c
2、oncentrate upon one or another of these questions. Scholars who study the “who,“ the communicator, look into the factors that initiate and guide the act of communication . We call this subdivision of the field of research control analysis. Specialists who focus upon the “says what“ engage in content
3、 analysis. Those who look primarily at the radio, press, film, and other channels of communication are doing media analysis (p. 84). When the principal concern is with the persons reached by the media, we speak of audience analysis. If the question is the impact upon audiences, the problem is effect
4、 analysis. Whether such distinctions are useful depends entirely upon the degree of refinement which is regarded as appropriate to a given scientific and managerial objective. Often it is simpler to combine audience and effect analysis, for instance, than to keep them apart. On the other hand, we ma
5、y want to concentrate on the analysis of content, and for this purpose subdivide the field into the study of purport and style, the first referring to the message, and the second to the arrangement of the elements of which the message iscomposed. Structure and functionEnticing as it is to work out t
6、hese categories in more detail, the present discussion has a different scope. We are less interested in dividing up the act of communication than in viewing the act as a whole in relation to the entire social process. Any process can be examined in two frames of reference, namely, structure and func
7、tion; and our analysis of communication will deal with the specializations that carry on certain functions, of which the following may be clearly distinguished: (i) the surveillance of the environment; (2) the correlation of the parts of society in responding to the 2environment; (3) the transmissio
8、n of the social heritage from one generation to the next. Biological equivalences At the risk of calling up false analogies, we can gain perspective on human societies when we note the degree to which communication is a feature of life at every level. A vital entity, whether relatively isolated or i
9、n association, has specialized ways of receiving stimuli from the environment. The single-celled organism or the many-membered group tends to maintain an internal equilibrium and to respond to changes in the environment in a way that maintains this equilibrium. The responding process calls for speci
10、alized ways of bringing the parts of the whole into harmonious action (p. 85). Multi-celled animals specialize cells to the function of external contact and internal correlation. Thus, among the primates, specialization is exemplified by organs such as the ear and eye, and the nervous system itself.
11、 When the stimuli receiving and disseminating patterns operate smoothly, the several parts of the animal act in concert in reference to the environment (“feeding,“ “fleeing,“ “attacking“).In some animal societies certain members perform specialized roles, and survey the environment. Individuals act
12、as “sentinels,“ standing apart from the herd or flock and creating a disturbance whenever an alarming change occurs in the surroundings. The trumpeting, cackling, or shrilling of the sentinel is enough to set the herd in motion. Among the activities engaged in by specialized “leaders“ is the interna
13、l stimulation of “followers“ to adapt in an orderly manner to the circumstances heralded by the sentinels. Within a single, highly differentiated organism, incoming nervous impulses and outgoing impulses are transmitted along fibers that make synaptic junction with other fibers. The critical points
14、in the process occur at the relay stations, where the arriving impulse may be too weak to reach the threshold which stirs the next link into action. At the higher centers, separate currents modify one another, producing results that differ in many ways from the outcome when each is allowed to contin
15、ue a separate path. At any relay station there is no conductance, total conductance, or intermediate conductance. The same categories apply to what goes on among members of an animal society. The sly fox may approach the barnyard in a way that supplies too meager stimuli for the sentinel to sound th
16、e alarm. Or the attacking animal may eliminate the sentinel before he makes more than a feeble outcry. Obviously there is every gradation possible between total conductance and no conductance (p. 86). Attention in World Society3When we examine the process of communication of any state in the world c
17、ommunity, we note three categories of specialists. One group surveys the political environment of the state as a whole, another correlates the response of the whole state to the environment, and the third transmits certain patterns of response from the old to the young. Diplomats, attaches, and fore
18、ign correspondents are representative of those who specialize on the environment. Editors, journalists, and speakers are correlators of the internal response. Educators in family and school transmit the social inheritance.Communications which originate abroad pass through sequences in which various
19、senders and receivers are linked with one another. Subject to modification at each relay point in the chain, messages originating with a diplomat or foreign correspondent may pass through editorial desks and eventually reach large audiences.If we think of the world attention process as a series of a
20、ttention frames, it is possible to describe the rate at which comparable content is brought to the notice of individuals and groups. We can inquire into the point at which “conductance“ no longer occurs; and we can look into the range between “total conductance“ and “minimum conductance.“ The metrop
21、olitan and political centers of the world have much in common with the interdependence, differentiation, and activity of the cortical or subcortical centers of an individual organism. Hence the attention frames found in these spots are the most variable, refined, and interactive of all frames in the
22、 world community. At the other extreme are the attention frames of primitive inhabitants of isolated areas. Not that folk cultures are wholly untouched by industrial civilization. Whether we parachute into the interior of New Guinea, or land on the slopes of the Himalayas, we find no tribe wholly ou
23、t of contact with the world. The long threads of trade, of missionary zeal, of adventurous exploration and scientific field study, and of global war reach far distant places. No one is entirely out of this world (p. 87). Among primitives the final shape taken by communication is the ballad or tale.
24、Remote happenings in the great world of affairs, happenings that come to the notice of metropolitan audiences, are reflected, however dimly, in the thematic material of ballad singers and reciters. In these creations faraway political leaders may be shown supplying land to the peasants or restoring
25、an abundance of game to the hills. When we push upstream of the flow of communication, we note that the immediate relay function for nomadic and remote tribesmen is sometimes performed by the inhabitants of settled villages with whom they come in occasional contact. The re-layer can be the school te
26、acher, doctor, judge, tax collector, policeman, soldier, peddler, salesman, missionary, student; in any case he is an assembly point of news and comment.More detailed equivalences 4The communication processes of human society, when examined in detail, reveal many equivalences to the specializations
27、found in the physical organism and in the lower animal societies. The diplomats, for instance, of a single state are stationed all over the world and send messages to a few focal points. Obviously, these incoming reports move from the many to the few, where they interact upon one another. Later on,
28、the sequence spreads fanwise according to a few-to-many pattern, as when a foreign secretary gives a speech in public, an article is put out in the press, or a news film is distributed to the theaters. The lines leading from the outer environment of the state are functionally equivalent to the affer
29、ent channels that convey incoming nervous impulses to the central nervous system of a single animal, and to the means by which alarm is spread among a flock. Outgoing, or efferent, impulses display corresponding parallels. The central nervous system of the body is only partly involved in the entire
30、flow of afferent-efferent impulses. There are automatic systems that can act on one another without involving the “higher“ centers at all (p. 88). The stability of the internal environment is maintained principally through the mediation of the vegetive or autonomic specializations of the nervous sys
31、tem. Similarly, most of the messages within any state do not involve the central channels of communication. They take place within families, neighborhoods, shops, field gangs, and other local contexts. Most of the educational process is carried on the same way.A further set of significant equivalenc
32、es is related to the circuits of communication , which are predominantly one-way or two-way, depending upon the degree of reciprocity between communicators and audience. Or, to express it differently, two-way communication occurs when the sending and receiving functions are performed with equal freq
33、uency by two or more persons. A conversation is usually assumed to be a pattern of two-way communication (although monologues are hardly unknown). The modern instruments of mass communication give an enormous advantage to the controllers of printing plants, broadcasting equipment, and other forms of
34、 fixed and specialized capital. But it should be noted that audiences do “talk back,“ after some delay; and many controllers of mass media use scientific methods of sampling in order to expedite this closing of the circuit.Circuits of two-way contact are particularly in evidence among the great metr
35、opolitan, political, and cultural centers of the world. New York, Moscow, London, and Paris, for example, are in intense two-way contact, even when the flow is severely curtailed in volume (as between Moscow and New York). Even insignificant sites become world centers when they are transformed into
36、capital cities (Canberra, Australia; Ankara, Turkey; the District of Columbia, U.S.A.). A cultural center like Vatican City is in intense two-way relationship with the dominant centers throughout the world. Even specialized production centers like Hollywood, despite their 5preponderance of outgoing
37、material, receive an enormous volume of messages.A further distinction can be made between message controlling and message handling centers and social formations. The (p. 89) message center in the vast Pentagon Building of the War Department in Washington transmits with no more than accidental chang
38、e incoming messages to addressees. This is the role of the printers and distributors of books; of dispatchers, linemen, and messengers connected with telegraphic communication ; of radio engineers and other technicians associated with broadcasting. Such message handlers may be contrasted with those
39、who affect the content of what is said, which is the communication of editors, censors, and propagandists. Speaking of the symbol specialists as a whole, therefore, we separate them into the manipulators (controllers) and the handlers; the first group typically modifies content, while the second doe
40、s not.Needs and valuesThough we have noted a number of functional and structural equivalences between communication in human societies and other living entities, it is not implied that we can most fruitfully investigate the process of communication in America or the world by the methods most appropr
41、iate to research on the lower animals or on single physical organisms. In comparative psychology when we describe some part of the surroundings of a rat, cat, or monkey as a stimulus (that is, as part of the environment reaching the attention of the animal), we cannot ask the rat; we use other means
42、 of inferring perception. When human beings are our objects of investigation, we can interview the great “talking animal.“ (This is not that we take everything at face value. Sometimes we forecast the opposite of what the person says he intends to do. In this case, we depend on other indications, bo
43、th verbal and nonverbal.) In the study of living forms, it is rewarding, as we have said, to look at them as modifiers of the environment in the process of gratifying needs, and hence of maintaining a steady state of internal equilibrium. Food, sex, and other activities which involve the environment
44、 can be examined on a comparative basis. Since human beings exhibit speech reactions, we can investigate many more relationships than in the nonhuman species (p. 90). Allowing for the data furnished by speech (and other communicative acts), we can investigate human society in terms of values; that i
45、s, in reference to categories of relationships that are recognized objects of gratification. In America, for example, it requires no elaborate technique of study to discern that power and respect are values. We can demonstrate this by listening to testimony, and by watching what is done when opportu
46、nity is afforded. 6It is possible to establish a list of values current in any group chosen for investigation. Further than this, we can discover the rank order in which these values are sought. We can rank the members of the group according to their positions in relation to the values. So far as in
47、dustrial civilization is concerned, we have no hesitation in saying that power, wealth, respect, wellbeing, and enlightenment are among the values. If we stop with this list, which is not exhaustive, we can describe on the basis of available knowledge (fragmentary though it may often be) the social
48、structure of most of the world. Since values are not equally distributed, the social structure reveals more or less concentration of relatively abundant shares of power, wealth, and other values in a few hands. In some places this concentration is passed on from generation to generation, forming cas
49、tes rather than a mobile society. In every society the values are shaped and distributed according to more or less distinctive patterns (institutions). The institutions include communications which are invoked in support of the network as a whole. Such communications are the ideology; and in relatio
50、n to power we can differentiate the political doctrine, the political formula, and the miranda. These are illustrated in the United States by the doctrine of individualism, the paragraphs of the Constitution, which are the formula, and the ceremonies and legends of public life, which comprise the Mi
