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

If we trace the history of communication studies from the aftermath of World War I to the present, its evolution does not resemble a linear progression of knowledge. Rather, it is a sequence of forced redirections—driven by power, technological conditions, and media structures. Each new form of communication has compelled the field to redefine what it studies, whom it serves, and what kind of human subject it implicitly assumes.

From the end of World War I through World War II and the early Cold War, communication studies in the United States gradually developed a highly “engineering-oriented” research orientation. This period did not begin with a unified theory. Instead, under the pressure of propaganda practice, opinion management, and attitude research, the field increasingly converged on a central question: can information be effectively delivered, and can it produce statistically predictable effects? Propaganda analysis, attitude-change research, and effects measurement became the dominant concerns. Mass audiences were often treated as entities that could be stimulated, influenced, and regulated; media were understood as relatively neutral transmission channels; and communication was decomposed into controllable input–output processes. This framework aligned closely with wartime propaganda, psychological warfare, and early Cold War governance, and was therefore repeatedly reinforced.

Within this orientation, Harold Lasswell’s most significant contribution was not a single theory but a foundational problem-setting for the field. His 1948 formulation—“Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect”—explicitly defined communication as a process oriented toward effects. In this framework, communication was first and foremost a relation of influence rather than a process of interaction. The central concern was not whether meaning was mutually understood, but whether influence occurred and whether it worked.

Under this model, audiences appeared only as objects acted upon. Their relevance lay solely in whether measurable change occurred. Understanding was not the core variable; change was. Once communication was modeled in this way, dialogue was effectively marginalized at the level of theory. Dialogue implies the possibility that all participants may be altered through interaction, whereas in an effects-oriented framework, change is assumed to occur in only one direction.

More deeply, this model presupposed that meaning was complete prior to transmission. Meaning was treated as something that could be encoded, transmitted, and delivered, rather than as a process requiring negotiation, contextual grounding, and potential transformation. As long as the sender selected the appropriate symbols, channels, and timing—and triggered the expected response—the communication was deemed successful. Ambiguity, negotiation, and uncertainty were not central objects of inquiry, but variables to be minimized and managed.

The concept of “effect” itself thus carried a strong normative charge. Communication was understood as a goal-directed intervention rather than an open-ended public process. Within this logic, once the goal was deemed legitimate, the audience’s understanding ceased to matter. This approach proved highly operational in political propaganda, advertising, and psychological warfare, but it was ill-suited to explaining processes that required public deliberation, shared meaning-making, and collective judgment.

By the mid-twentieth century, this assumption encountered its first systematic challenge. Beginning in the 1940s, election studies demonstrated that mass audiences were not entirely passive and that communication effects were neither direct nor universal. Interpersonal networks, opinion leaders, and social structures played significant mediating and buffering roles. What later came to be summarized as the “limited effects” perspective did not deny influence altogether, but argued that influence was neither linear, immediate, nor omnipotent. Communication studies appeared to grow more moderate and socially oriented, yet its underlying objective remained largely unchanged: not the abandonment of influence, but its redesign in more indirect and structured forms. Communication shifted from “acting directly upon you” to “acting upon you through the people and environments you trust.”

Around the same period, the nature of media itself entered the field’s analytical horizon. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan’s proposition that “the medium is the message” constituted a fundamental challenge to prevailing assumptions. His focus was not on content, but on how media forms themselves operate as environments that reshape perception, temporal experience, and social organization. Media were no longer neutral conduits, but active forces structuring social relations.

Before McLuhan, communication studies largely assumed that the same content transmitted through different media remained essentially the same message, differing only in efficiency or reach. McLuhan rejected this premise. He argued that different media do not simply package the same information differently, but generate fundamentally different perceptual structures. The forces that most deeply, durably, and irreversibly transform society are not what is said through media, but how media reshape the ways people perceive the world and relate to one another.

In this sense, “the medium is the message” does not deny the importance of content. Rather, it highlights that the most consequential effects of media occur before content is consciously interpreted. By altering attention distribution, rhythm, modes of participation, and sensory balance, media shape how understanding is even possible. By the time individuals evaluate whether they believe a particular message, their perceptual structures are often already set.

This perspective makes McLuhan’s insights appear especially prescient in today’s platform-dominated environment. When media cease to be mere tools and instead become inescapable environments, communicative power no longer resides primarily in persuasion through content, but in the capacity of media forms to rewrite everyday life.

With the rise of the internet and platform-based media, communication studies did not abandon its existing theories, but many of their core assumptions began to falter. Communication ceased to be linear and instead became networked, recursive, and continuously feedback-driven. Agenda-setting, framing, and the spiral of silence were not products of the internet era, but they had to be reinterpreted under new conditions in which platforms control visibility, ordering, and distribution. Under these conditions, communicative power could no longer be understood as a purely content-based phenomenon.

In short-video platforms in particular, the analytical focus has shifted further. Communication is no longer primarily about how information persuades, but about how attention is continuously shaped. Content is not actively chosen, but systematically pushed. Communicative agency becomes diffuse, as algorithms assume the role of distribution and selection while remaining opaque and largely unaccountable. The basic unit of communication shifts from “information” to “behavioral feedback”: viewing time, rewatching, and interaction become more consequential than understanding.

Within this structure, the goal of communication shifts from attitude change to habit formation. Platforms do not require users to believe in a coherent explanatory framework; they require only predictable patterns of use. Power no longer operates chiefly through discursive consistency, but through rhythmic control—regulating when users watch, how long they watch, and the emotional states in which watching occurs.

As a result, the primary arena of communication shifts from public reasoning to attention management, from meaning production to time occupation. Conflicting narratives can coexist within the same feed as long as they capture attention. Ideological consistency is no longer necessary; occupying cognitive bandwidth alone is sufficient to sustain the system.

When communication operates through rhythm rather than meaning, public deliberation faces a structural crisis. People are not conquered by particular viewpoints, but gradually reshaped by modes of information intake. Beliefs may change frequently, but once attention patterns, patience thresholds, and participatory rhythms stabilize, the range of what can be carefully understood and seriously considered contracts. Ultimately, occupying time becomes a means of defining the boundaries of thought, and communicative power completes its shift from “persuading people what to believe” to “determining how people exist within a media environment.”