Preface: What Does Communication Studies Mean for Us Today? This article was co-written with ChatGPT.

If we trace communication studies from the aftermath of World War I to the present, its development has not been a story of linear progress. Instead, it has been repeatedly forced onto new tracks by power, technology, and platform structures. Each emergence of a “new form of communication” has compelled the field to rewrite the very questions it cares about.

From the end of World War I to the end of World War II was the “engineering formation phase” of communication studies. This period revolved around a single core question: can information be precisely delivered and produce predictable effects? Harold Lasswell, propaganda analysis, and attitude change research occupied the center of the field. The masses were assumed to be objects that could be uniformly stimulated; media were treated as neutral channels; communication was understood as an input–output system. This logic was fully consolidated during World War II and the early Cold War, and it directly served state propaganda, psychological warfare, and domestic governance.

Harold Lasswell’s most important contribution was not a specific theory, but his fundamental definition of communication itself. He defined communication as a process of power, not as social interaction. What concerned him was not whether understanding occurred, but whether influence was effective. His famous formula—“Who says what, through which channel, to whom, with what effect”—already defined communication as a relation of impact rather than a process of relationship formation.

In this model, the audience appears only as a “recipient of effects.” Their value exists solely in the final “effect.” The audience is not “understanding,” but “changing.” Once communication is defined this way, dialogue becomes impossible, because dialogue implies that both sides can change one another. Here, change is permitted only in one direction.

At a deeper level, the formula assumes that “meaning” is already complete at the sender’s end. Meaning is not generated in the process of communication; it is packed into a message, transported through a channel, and then produces effects on the audience. In other words, meaning is reified—treated as something deliverable—rather than as a process that requires negotiation, depends on context, and constantly shifts.

This directly eliminates the possibility of negotiation. Negotiation implies that meaning is not fully controlled by any one party, but emerges through interaction. In Lasswell’s model, interaction itself is redundant. Whether communication succeeds depends only on whether the sender chooses the right symbols, channels, and rhythms, and whether the expected response is triggered in the audience.

More crucially, the word “effect” carries a strong normative charge. Communication is not an open-ended process, but an intervention with a predetermined endpoint. As long as there is a goal, negotiation is unnecessary; as long as the goal is considered legitimate, audience understanding is irrelevant. This logic works extremely well in political propaganda, advertising, and psychological warfare, but it is disastrous in any context that genuinely requires public deliberation.

From this perspective, Lasswell did not “overlook” dialogue; he consciously excluded it from the definition of communication. Dialogue introduces uncertainty, and the problem he sought to solve was precisely uncertainty. In his view, the greatest risk in a democratic society was not the abuse of power, but the unpredictability of the masses. The task of communication studies was to reduce this unpredictability and bring human responses within a manageable range.

Propaganda analysis emerged precisely within this framework. By the mid–Cold War period, this assumption faced its first systematic challenge. Researchers discovered that audiences were not entirely passive, and that media effects did not always strike directly. “Limited effects theory” appeared, emphasizing the buffering roles of interpersonal networks, opinion leaders, and social structures. On the surface, communication studies became more “moderate” and “academic,” but its underlying goal did not change: not to abandon control, but to redesign it in more subtle and indirect forms. Communication shifted from “hitting you directly” to “hitting you through the people around you.”

At the same time, the medium itself entered the field of vision. Marshall McLuhan proposed “the medium is the message,” shifting attention from content to media structure. This was a crucial turn: communication is not just about what is said, but about how media forms reshape perception, temporality, and social relations. Television does not merely transmit programs; it restructures family life, politics, and public life. At this stage, communication studies first touched on the “environmental power” of technology, though it still lacked a deep analysis of capital and platform structures.

McLuhan’s assertion that “the medium is the message” was a frontal dismantling of the foundational assumptions of communication studies. He was not saying that content does not matter; he was saying that what truly changes society in a long-term, deep, and irreversible way is not what is said within a medium, but the medium itself, as an environment, reshaping how people perceive, think, and relate to one another.

Before McLuhan, communication studies assumed that media were neutral conduits and that information was the core variable. The same message, whether printed in a newspaper, spoken on the radio, or shown on television, was essentially the same—only its transmission efficiency differed. McLuhan directly rejected this. Different media, he argued, are not different packages for the same information; they are entirely different perceptual structures. Content may be similar, but the social consequences are radically different.

What McLuhan meant by “information” was not specific content, but the systemic changes a medium introduces into time structures, spatial relations, sensory balance, and social organization. Print did not merely spread book content; it fostered linear thinking, individualism, nation-states, and bureaucratic systems. Television did not merely broadcast programs; it produced immediacy, emotionalization, and a de-deepened public politics. These changes have little to do with what programs are aired, and everything to do with the act of using television itself.

When media alter the balance of human senses, you have not even reached the stage of “whether you believe” yet. What changes first are attention distribution, sense of rhythm, patience thresholds, and modes of participation. Television does not make you “believe” a viewpoint; it trains you to understand the world through fragments, emotions, and images. By the time you notice problems of content, the perceptual structure is already fixed.

This is why McLuhan’s judgment of modern communication is closer to today’s reality than that of many of his contemporaries. Without ever using the word “algorithm,” he already saw that real power lies in media form itself. Once media become an environment, you can no longer simply “opt out” or “oppose” them. You can only live within them—and life itself is gradually rewritten.

Applied to today’s short-video and platform environment, “the medium is the message” becomes almost self-evident. What content you scroll through matters, but more important is whether you are accustomed to vertical screens, to autoplay, to being recommended rather than choosing, to judging everything in a few seconds. These habits shape you more deeply than any specific ideology. Content can swing left and right, but once media rhythm stabilizes, it is extremely difficult to reverse.

McLuhan nearly declared the obsolescence of traditional communication studies. If media themselves are producing meaning, then studying “how information persuades people” can only skim the surface. The real question becomes: when media structures change, how much capacity do humans still have to generate meaning autonomously? The most dangerous form of communication has never been what you hear, but the kind of person you gradually become within a particular media environment.

With the arrival of the internet, communication studies experienced its first true paradigm collapse. Decentralization, interactivity, and user-generated content caused models like “who says what to whom” to fall apart. Communication was no longer linear, but networked, recursive, and real-time. Research shifted toward agenda-setting, framing theory, the spiral of silence, and mechanisms of online public opinion formation. It appeared more democratic, but in reality, power merely shifted from states to platforms and algorithms.

With platforms such as Douyin / TikTok as representatives, communication studies now faces a different problem entirely. The issue is no longer “how information persuades,” but “how attention is domesticated.” The subject of communication is no longer clearly identifiable; content is not chosen but pushed; audiences are not understanding but being continuously trained. Algorithms become the new communicators—yet they are invisible, unaccountable, and opaque.

The unit of communication shifts from “information” to “behavioral feedback.” How long you watch, whether you pause, whether you rewatch matters more than what you understand. The goal of communication shifts from attitude change to habit formation. Algorithms do not need you to believe anything; they only need you to form stable usage paths. Communicative power shifts from discourse control to rhythm control—controlling when you watch, how long you watch, and in what emotional state you watch.

Communication studies is forced to pivot as well. It begins borrowing the language of data science, behavioral economics, and neuroscience to study addiction mechanisms, filter bubbles, emotional polarization, and algorithmic amplification. But a harsh reality remains: academic research is clearly lagging behind platform practice. Communication studies increasingly resembles a system of post-hoc explanation rather than a forward-looking theory.

Communication studies has moved from “how to persuade the masses,” to “how to shape environments,” and then to “how to automate attention management.” Today’s communication no longer requires ideological consistency; it only requires the continuous occupation of your time and cognitive bandwidth. Writing this inevitably leads to a question: when communication no longer operates through meaning, but through algorithmic rhythms, has “public deliberation” become structurally impossible?

The “winning strategy” of modern communication has changed. Traditional propaganda resembled a political engineering project, aiming to make you believe a particular interpretive framework and align with a stable camp. Platform-based communication today resembles an attention industry: the goal is not to make you believe the same thing, but to keep you inside the system, continuously producing predictable behavioral data. As long as you keep watching, clicking, pausing, commenting, and sharing, what you believe becomes a secondary variable.

You can observe a structure that seems absurd yet is highly effective: the same feed can push mutually contradictory narratives at the same time. Logical coherence is unnecessary; emotional capture is enough. Today you are driven by anger, tomorrow by sympathy, the day after by pleasure—it all works. The system does not require you to build a worldview; it only requires you to form usage habits. Ideology is an order at the level of content; cognitive bandwidth occupation is an order at the level of time and rhythm. The latter is more fundamental and harder to resist.

The key to occupying cognitive bandwidth is not information itself, but rhythm control. Vertical screens, full-screen immersion, autoplay, infinite scrolling—these designs strip “choice” from your hands and turn viewing into a default state. You are not deciding what to watch; you are passively receiving stimuli and providing micro-feedback. The system treats this feedback as training signals, continuously converging on content combinations that keep you going. Communication ceases to be “the transmission of meaning” and becomes “the training of attention.” Meaning can be arbitrary; training must be continuous.

This explains why contemporary communication becomes increasingly emotional, fragmented, extreme, and theatrical. Emotion is a rapid attention-capture device, capable of determining in milliseconds whether you stop or move on. Complex arguments, rigorous facts, and long-term consistent narratives are structurally disadvantaged. Platforms reward high click-through, high retention, and high interaction—not coherence or truth value. As a result, the main battlefield of communication shifts from public reasoning to emotional modulation, from understanding the world to staying online.

When ideological consistency is no longer necessary, communicative power shifts accordingly. Traditional propaganda power lay in defining what is true, who the enemy is, and what is legitimate. Platform power today lies more in deciding what is seen, in what order, and within what emotional range you are kept. You still feel as though you are freely choosing content, but your visibility range, rhythm, and switching costs are already designed.

At this point, the internal structure of the human subject has been rewritten. Long-term occupation of cognitive bandwidth leads to fragmented attention, lowered patience thresholds, aversion to slow information, and dependence on strong stimuli. We are not conquered by a single viewpoint, but reshaped by a mode of information intake. Viewpoints can change frequently, but once intake patterns stabilize, they determine what kinds of viewpoints you can even tolerate. You no longer have sufficient cognitive bandwidth for long chains of reasoning, nor the willingness to pay the time cost of uncertain understanding. “Occupying time” ultimately becomes “shaping the range of what can be thought.”

Ideology still exists, and in some domains it is even intensified. But at the platform level, it is not a necessary condition. The system can feed you multiple, mutually antagonistic ideologies simultaneously, as long as they keep you watching. What is truly unified is not your stance, but your behavior pattern: continuous staying, continuous feedback, continuous recommendation. Belief requires consistency; being unable to stop only requires occupation. Once occupation succeeds, meaning automatically retreats.