Preface: Although communication studies came to be widely recognized after the Industrial Revolution, communication itself has existed for a very long time. This essay begins with the origins of communication studies and concludes by introducing another key figure in its history, Walter Lippmann. This article was co-written with ChatGPT.

Before the late nineteenth century, human beings had long engaged in “communication,” but this was not yet communication studies. Religious preaching, royal proclamations, rumors, and word-of-mouth all existed, but they lacked a crucial precondition: a mass influence mechanism that was scalable, reproducible, and predictable. The Industrial Revolution changed this. Urbanization compressed previously dispersed individuals into dense populations, while newspapers, the telegraph, and cheap printing made it possible for information to reach millions of strangers simultaneously for the first time. This gave rise to new questions: who controls information, who is being influenced, and why the same message can provoke uniform reactions across large groups.

Religious sermons, royal decrees, rumors, and oral transmission may all seem to influence people, but their effects were highly context-dependent. The effectiveness of a sermon depended on the personal authority of the clergy, the sanctity of the setting, and the audience’s faith background. The enforceability of a royal order relied on violence, hierarchy, and local structures rather than persuasion. Rumors spread along chaotic paths, at uncontrollable speeds, and with constantly mutating content. None of these forms of communication could be broken down into stable variables, let alone subjected to repeated experiments. One could not answer questions such as, “If I rephrase this message and say it again, will it have the same effect?” Without reproducibility, there can be no theory.

The structural changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution meant that urbanization was not merely an increase in population, but the first time strangers coexisted densely and over long periods within the same information space. In rural societies, people understood the world through networks of acquaintances. In cities, large numbers of individuals who did not know one another read the same newspapers at the same time, saw the same posters, and were angered or comforted by the same news stories. Here, a new object appeared for the first time: “the masses.” They were neither a community nor an organization, but a collection of strangers who could be synchronously triggered at the psychological level.

The significance of newspapers, telegraphs, and cheap printing was not merely that communication became faster, but that information, for the first time, existed independently of specific social relationships. A news story did not require you to know the journalist or the other readers, yet it could affect tens of thousands of people on the same day. This meant that communication began to exhibit observable regularities. The same information, the same layout, and the same narrative structure could elicit similar reactions in different cities. Fear, anger, nationalist sentiment, and moral panic began to display group-level synchronization. This was precisely the trigger for the emergence of communication studies.

The questions that followed were both fatal and profoundly practical. If the masses could be triggered simultaneously, who was pressing the button? Why did certain narratives spread rapidly while others were ignored? Why could the same facts, presented differently, provoke drastically different social reactions? These were not philosophical questions, but questions of governance, commerce, and war. Communication studies did not arise to enable “better communication,” but to understand and manage this new kind of risk.

The true historical starting point of communication studies was not how long communication had existed, but the moment society first realized that mass opinion could be systematically shaped—and that if this process was not understood, it could rebound and destabilize social order itself. From that moment on, communication ceased to be a mere cultural byproduct and became a force that needed to be studied, modeled, and controlled. Communication studies were born there, and from the outset stood on the side of power and fear.

This is also why the origins of communication studies are not romantic. They did not stem from the idea that “human beings finally want to understand one another,” but from the fear of ruling elites, capital, and the state toward an uncontrollable mass public. Strikes, riots, revolutions, and financial panics were all found to be closely linked to the spread of information. Information no longer merely reflected reality; it began to manufacture reality.

In the previous articles, we discussed how Bernays directly participated in U.S. government propaganda institutions, entering the operational front line of “how to shape public attitudes in a short period of time,” successfully contributing to the removal of Guatemala’s president, and how his three books—Crystallizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, and The Engineering of Consent—outlined his core ideas.

The first book, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), occupies a crucial place in history. It is almost the first theoretical self-description of “public relations” as a profession. Here, Bernays rewrote the cognitive premise. He explicitly denied that public opinion arises naturally and proposed that “opinion must be crystallized.” Crystallization did not mean fabricating facts, but organizing, focusing, and directing diffuse, vague, and emotional social attitudes. Importantly, Bernays still maintained a technician’s restraint in this book. Public relations was described as a professional labor that coordinated social relations, striving to appear neutral, rational, and oriented toward the public interest. This was his most “moderate” work.

Five years later, Propaganda was published, and the tone changed completely. If the first book explained “what we are doing,” this one declared, “this is reality, and there is nothing to hide.” Bernays stated bluntly that a democratic society cannot exist without propaganda. The real question was not whether to manipulate, but who manipulates. The danger of this book lies not in its malice, but in its extreme frankness. It rationalized manipulation and framed guidance as a necessary condition of democracy. From the perspective of communication history, this was a point of no return: communication was no longer understood as dialogue, but formally defined as a technology of power.

The third book, The Engineering of Consent, was written after World War II, as the Cold War was unfolding. Its focus was no longer on legitimacy, but on systematization. The phrase “engineering consent” itself is explicit: public attitudes can be designed, tested, adjusted, and maintained. Bernays largely abandoned moral justification here and instead emphasized process, expert collaboration, long-term planning, and social stability. He likened opinion shaping to an engineering project, arguing that with correct methods, social consensus could be continuously produced. This book marked the upgrade of communication from a strategic behavior to an institutional capacity and foreshadowed the rise of political consultants, campaign machines, and corporate branding systems.

In summary, the first book confirmed that “public opinion is not natural,” the second declared that “manipulation is inevitable,” and the third concluded, “then let us engineer it.”

Yet alongside Bernays, there was another important figure in communication studies: Walter Lippmann.

Walter Lippmann is the least “like a communication scholar” among the founders of the field, yet he is also the most unavoidable. He was neither a technician nor a propagandist, but someone who stood aside and calmly observed how modern society spiraled out of control. Precisely because he did not intend to “solve problems,” his judgments were exceptionally sharp.

Born in 1889, like Bernays, Lippmann grew up in an era of rapid industrialization and highly concentrated media in the United States. He received rigorous training in philosophy and politics and entered journalism early, serving for a long time as a political columnist for major newspapers. This is crucial: he did not imagine “the public” from an ivory tower, but repeatedly observed, within real news production, political struggle, and wartime narratives, how the public was guided, misled, and mobilized by information. His ideas were not abstract deductions, but conclusions drawn from long-term observation.

World War I was decisive for him. During the war, the U.S. government mobilized public opinion on a massive scale, constructing enemy narratives, emotional consensus, and moral legitimacy. Lippmann saw firsthand how a society that claimed to be rational could be led by a unified narrative in a very short time. This did not excite him; it alarmed him. He began to realize a fundamental problem: the complexity of modern society had far surpassed what ordinary individuals could comprehend through direct experience.

This realization crystallized in his 1922 book Public Opinion, where Lippmann introduced a concept that has been repeatedly cited but often underestimated in its severity: the “pseudo-environment.”

The pseudo-environment does not accuse the media of lying, nor does it belittle public intelligence. It points to a more fundamental and irreparable structural fact: reality has grown too large to be directly experienced by any individual. Modern politics, economics, war, finance, and international relations all occur beyond the radius of everyday life. Ordinary people cannot witness state operations, diplomatic maneuvering, or industrial systems firsthand, yet they must still form judgments and attitudes about them.

Under these conditions, people can only live through “mediated reality.” Headlines, images, slogans, statistics, narrative frames, and moral labels are not reality itself, but compressed, edited, and formatted versions of it. Lippmann argued that humans do not act in response to the world, but in response to their images of the world. These images are not fabricated out of nothing; they are assembled from materials continuously supplied by the media, forming a psychological layer between individuals and reality. He called this layer the pseudo-environment: it resembles reality but is not identical to it, yet in practice it replaces reality.

Crucially, this process is not driven by conspiracy. Even if all journalists were perfectly honest, the pseudo-environment would still be unavoidable. The reason is simple: news as a form can only present fragments of events, whereas public affairs require systemic understanding. A war is reduced to victories and defeats, heroes and sacrifices; an economic cycle is simplified into rises and falls, confidence and panic; a social problem is compressed into individual cases and emotional symbols. This is not distortion, but cognitive compression. Without it, action would be impossible.

Here Lippmann delivered a cold but vital judgment: stereotypes are not moral flaws, but cognitive tools. Humans must categorize in order to quickly locate their positions in a complex world. The problem is not why people use stereotypes, but where those stereotypes come from, who repeatedly reinforces them, and what structures they serve. When stereotypes become tightly coupled with media narratives, public reactions exhibit high uniformity. They may look “manipulated,” but in essence they are being pushed by structural forces.

Therefore, Lippmann repeatedly emphasized that the public is not stupid. On the contrary, the public is rationally adapting to a world that cannot be fully understood. People rely on simplified models, emotional cues, and symbolic judgments for efficiency, not because they lack intelligence. The real problem arises when political systems pretend that the public is making judgments about the “real world.” Under that pretense, democracy is built on self-deception.

This is what makes the pseudo-environment most dangerous. Once people treat media-constructed reality as the only reality they can perceive, those who control narrative structures no longer need to control truth itself. They need only control visibility, framing, and emotional entry points. In this sense, Lippmann was not exposing manipulation techniques, but warning of an irreversible consequence: in modern society, power operates less through violence or law and more through the management of versions of reality.

In other words, the issue is not that “people are easily deceived,” but that in a society beyond the scale of direct perception, being surrounded by simplified realities is everyone’s fate. The difference lies only in whether one recognizes living within a pseudo-environment or mistakes it for the world itself.

Lippmann was a diagnostician. He confronted what he believed to be an irreversible fact: modern society is too complex for the general public to understand through direct experience. People can only rely on images and narratives supplied by the media to judge reality, and thus the public lives within a pseudo-environment rather than reality itself. Under this premise, “rational public opinion” is structurally impossible. Democracy is not built on citizens’ full understanding, but on the management of insufficient understanding. This judgment was cold, but honest. Lippmann was not excited by it; he was cautious, even pessimistic.

Bernays was an executor. He fully accepted Lippmann’s premise but refused to stop at concern. His conclusion was more direct: if the public is inevitably shaped by narratives, then the question is not whether to manipulate, but who manipulates and how. He openly argued that democratic societies require a small group of professionals to guide public emotion and opinion, otherwise society would descend into chaos. Unlike Lippmann, Bernays did not see this as a tragedy, but as a professional ethic and technical mission. He called this guidance “public relations,” not “propaganda.”

The divergence between the two is clear. Lippmann was concerned with the structural rupture between truth and the public. His question was: if the public cannot access reality, how can democracy still function? Bernays was concerned with how power operates within that rupture. His question was: if the rupture cannot be eliminated, how can it be efficiently used? One asked, “What does this mean?” The other asked, “What should we do?”

Bernays did not misread Lippmann; he understood him completely. He translated Lippmann’s theoretical judgments into operational logic. When Lippmann said the public depends on symbols and narratives, Bernays studied how to design symbols. When Lippmann said emotion precedes reason, Bernays directly manipulated emotion. When Lippmann said consensus is manufactured, Bernays systematized the manufacture of consensus. In this sense, Bernays was the most faithful—and most dangerous—heir to Lippmann’s ideas.

Their views on democracy also differed sharply. Lippmann was not anti-democratic, but deeply skeptical of mass democracy, seeking to reduce the destructiveness of public judgment through elite governance, expert knowledge, and institutional design. Bernays largely bypassed this moral dilemma. He assumed that democracy is, in practice, opinion management, and that as long as outcomes are stable, orderly, and aligned with “progress,” the means need not be overly scrutinized. This is why Bernays’s theories flowed into advertising, corporate public relations, and political campaigns, while Lippmann’s work remained more firmly within intellectual history and political theory.

Walter Lippmann’s importance extends far beyond Public Opinion. To see him only as the originator of the pseudo-environment is to underestimate his true weight in twentieth-century politics, journalism, and international order. His role can be understood as repeatedly stepping forward at critical moments in the formation of the modern world to point out where structural problems lay—judgments that were often later confirmed by reality.

First, he profoundly shaped modern political commentary. Lippmann was not an ordinary journalist; he elevated the role of the political columnist into a recognized institutional presence. Writing for major U.S. media outlets, his goal was never merely to provide information, but to explain the structures behind it. He maintained an unpopular stance at the time: news can never equal truth, and the journalist’s responsibility is not to pretend omniscience, but to acknowledge limitations and reduce misunderstanding. This directly influenced the legitimacy of interpretive reporting and analytical commentary in later journalistic ethics.

Second, he played a crucial yet often overlooked role during World War I and the postwar order. Lippmann participated in U.S. policy research and propaganda systems and served as an observer and advisor at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This experience made him acutely aware of the rupture between national narratives and real politics. He witnessed how concepts like “national self-determination” and “permanent peace” could succeed rhetorically yet be crushed by power structures in negotiations. This led to his sustained skepticism toward public opinion and political symbolism. He was not an antiwar idealist, but one of the first to recognize that grand narratives themselves are dangerous political tools.

Later, his redefinition of democracy proved equally influential. Lippmann did not advocate simple elitism, but a functionally differentiated view of democracy. He argued that the complexity of modern society makes it impossible for the public to directly govern public affairs. The core of democracy lies not in universal understanding, but in whether institutions can effectively filter emotion, incorporate expertise, and limit the destructive effects of propaganda. This position sparked a famous debate with figures such as John Dewey, who placed greater faith in public discussion and education. That debate laid the foundation for a long-standing divide in twentieth-century political philosophy over whether democracy requires management.

Finally, Lippmann also made foundational contributions to international relations. He argued early on that international politics is not a contest of moral principles, but a system driven by information asymmetry, misperception, and domestic public opinion pressures. He was highly wary of early Cold War ideological polarization and opposed reducing complex geopolitics to binary moral narratives. This stance was not always popular in the United States, but later proved remarkably prescient.

Taken together, Lippmann’s position was remarkably consistent. He never offered simple solutions or sold hope. His contribution lay in relentlessly dismantling the illusions of modern society: public rationality, media transparency, the natural functioning of democracy, and a moral international order. Once these illusions are punctured, discomfort follows—but only then can institutions begin to become more honest.