Preface: 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 societies had of course long engaged in forms of “communication,” but this was not yet communication studies in the modern sense. Religious preaching, royal proclamations, rumor, and word-of-mouth circulation all existed, yet they lacked a crucial precondition: a mode of influence that could be scaled, repeatedly deployed, and that exhibited statistically observable and, to some extent, predictable effects on large populations. What the Industrial Revolution altered was not merely production, but the relationship between information and social structure.

Urbanization compressed individuals who had previously been dispersed within dense networks of acquaintances into environments of prolonged, high-density coexistence among strangers. Newspapers, the telegraph, and cheap print technologies made it possible for information to reach millions of people—people who did not know one another—within the same temporal window. This transformation did not simply mean that information traveled faster; it generated an entirely new problem space: who controls the production and circulation of information, who is influenced by it, and why the same message can elicit highly synchronized emotional and behavioral responses across a population.

Earlier forms of communication were highly dependent on context. The effectiveness of a religious sermon depended on the personal authority of the clergy, the sanctity of the setting, and the prior beliefs of the audience. The enforceability of a royal decree relied on coercive force, hierarchy, and local power structures rather than persuasion. Rumors spread along unstable paths, at unpredictable speeds, with content that mutated continuously. These forms of influence were not ineffective, but they were difficult to decompose into stable variables and nearly impossible to validate across contexts. One could not systematically ask: if I deploy the same message structure in another city, to another group of strangers, will it produce a similar effect? Without this kind of repeatability, theoretical modeling could scarcely emerge.

The transformation brought about by industrial society lay not simply in population growth, but in the fact that strangers were now persistently connected within the same informational environment. In rural societies, people primarily understood the world through familiar interpersonal networks. In cities, large numbers of individuals who did not know one another nonetheless read the same newspaper on the same day, saw the same posters, and were angered or reassured by the same headlines. Under these conditions, a new object came into view: “the public.” It was neither a community nor an organization, but a collection of strangers whose psychological responses could be triggered in synchrony.

The deeper significance of newspapers, telegraphy, and cheap print was therefore not merely increased efficiency, but the fact that information began to exist independently of specific social relationships. A news item did not require that one know the journalist, nor that one know other readers, in order to exert influence over thousands simultaneously. Under these conditions, communication began to display observable and comparable regularities: similar informational structures, narrative frames, and emotional cues often produced similar collective reactions across different locations. Fear, anger, nationalist sentiment, and moral panic began to manifest as synchronized, group-level phenomena. It was within this structural transformation that communication first became an object that demanded systematic study.

The questions that followed were neither abstract nor philosophical; they were immediately tied to governance, commerce, and warfare. If publics could be triggered simultaneously, who was defining the triggering conditions? Why did some narratives spread rapidly while others were ignored? Why did the same facts, presented differently, produce radically divergent social responses? Communication studies gradually took shape as an attempt to answer these questions. Its original impulse was not to “help people understand one another better,” but to understand and manage a novel form of social risk.

From this perspective, the historical origin of communication studies lies not in how long communication had existed, but in the moment society first recognized that public opinion could be systematically shaped—and that, if left unexamined, this force could rebound against social order itself. From that point on, communication was no longer a mere cultural byproduct, but a power that had to be studied, modeled, and constrained. Communication studies thus emerged already intertwined with power and fear.

This also explains why the origins of communication studies are anything but romantic. They did not arise from a belief that humanity had finally decided to understand itself, but from the deep anxiety of states, capital, and governing elites faced with the volatility of mass publics. Strikes, riots, revolutions, and financial panics were repeatedly observed to be tightly coupled with information flows. Information ceased merely to reflect reality and began, in a structural sense, to participate in the production of reality.

It was within this context that Edward Bernays emerged. Bernays was not simply a theorist; he was someone who entered directly into the operational spaces of state and corporate opinion management. He participated in the U.S. government’s wartime propaganda apparatus during World War I and later, as a public relations consultant, helped shape domestic American perceptions of foreign political events, including the creation of public legitimacy for U.S. actions in Guatemala. His historical significance does not lie in the notion that a single individual “toppled a government,” but in demonstrating how opinion formation became an integrated component of modern power.

His 1923 book Crystallizing Public Opinion occupies a clear watershed position. It was among the first works in which public relations, as a profession, provided a systematic theoretical account of itself. Bernays explicitly rejected the idea that public opinion forms naturally, proposing instead that it must be “crystallized.” By crystallization, he did not mean fabricating facts, but organizing, focusing, and directing diffuse, ambiguous, and emotional social attitudes. In this book, he still maintained a technocratic restraint, presenting public relations as a professional practice aimed at coordinating social relationships and serving the public interest. It is his most restrained and moderate work.

The tone shifted markedly with Propaganda (1928). If the earlier book explained “what we are doing,” this one openly acknowledged “this is the reality of democratic society.” Bernays argued that modern democracy could not function without propaganda, and that the real question was not whether manipulation should exist, but who should wield it and how. He normalized guidance and manipulation as necessary conditions of democratic governance. The danger of the book lies not in its moral stance, but in its candor: communication is here explicitly defined as a technology of power rather than an art of mutual understanding.

In the postwar period, The Engineering of Consent pushed this logic further. At this stage, Bernays was no longer concerned with moral justification, but with systematization. The phrase “engineering of consent” itself makes the premise unmistakable: public attitudes are treated as objects that can be designed, tested, adjusted, and maintained over time. Bernays likened opinion formation to an engineering project, emphasizing process, expert collaboration, and long-term planning. This marked the elevation of communication from a tactical practice to an institutional capacity, foreshadowing the rise of political consulting, campaign machinery, and corporate branding systems.

If Bernays represents execution and operation, Walter Lippmann represents diagnosis. Lippmann was not a technical communication scholar, but an observer positioned at the intersection of journalism and political practice, watching modern society lose its stability within information flows.

Born in 1889, Lippmann came of age during rapid industrialization and media concentration in the United States. He received rigorous training in philosophy and political theory and spent much of his career as a political columnist for major newspapers. This distinction matters: he did not imagine “the public” from an academic distance, but repeatedly observed how publics were guided, mobilized, and misled within real processes of news production, political conflict, and wartime narrative construction.

World War I was decisive for him. During the war, the U.S. government mobilized public opinion on a massive scale, producing enemy narratives, emotional consensus, and moral justification. Lippmann witnessed how a society that considered itself rational could be rapidly pulled along by a unified narrative. This did not excite him; it alarmed him. He began to grasp a fundamental problem: the complexity of modern society had far exceeded the capacity of ordinary individuals to comprehend it through direct experience.

In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann introduced the concept of the “pseudo-environment,” later widely cited but often stripped of its severity. This concept was not an accusation of media dishonesty, nor a denigration of public intelligence, but a structural diagnosis: reality itself had become too vast to be directly experienced. Politics, economics, war, finance, and international relations largely unfolded beyond the radius of everyday life, yet individuals were still required to form judgments about them.

Under these conditions, people could only live through mediated reality. Headlines, images, statistics, narrative frames, and moral labels are not reality itself, but compressed, edited, and formatted versions of it. Humans act not on the world directly, but on their images of the world—images continuously supplied and reinforced by media. Lippmann called this intervening psychological layer the “pseudo-environment,” emphasizing that while it resembles reality, it is not identical to it, yet in practice comes to replace it.

Crucially, this process does not depend on conspiracy. Even if all journalists were perfectly honest, the pseudo-environment would remain unavoidable, because news as a form can only present fragments of reality, whereas public affairs demand systemic understanding. This is cognitive compression, not mere distortion.

From this, Lippmann derived a stark but essential conclusion: stereotypes are not moral failures, but cognitive tools. Faced with complexity, humans must categorize in order to orient themselves rapidly. The real question is not why people use stereotypes, but where those stereotypes come from, how they are reinforced, and whose interests they serve.

The public, then, is not irrational, but rationally adapting to a world that cannot be fully understood. The danger for democracy does not lie in the absence of public reason, but in political systems that pretend the public is responding directly to “reality itself.”

Here the divergence between Lippmann and Bernays becomes clear. Lippmann asked what this structural rupture meant; Bernays asked how power should operate once the rupture was acknowledged as permanent. Bernays did not misread Lippmann—he operationalized him. In this sense, Bernays was Lippmann’s most faithful and most dangerous heir.

Lippmann’s contribution was not to offer solutions, but to dismantle the illusions of modern society: public rationality, media transparency, naturally functioning democracy, and morally grounded international order. These illusions, once punctured, are unsettling—but only then can institutions begin to operate with greater honesty.