Why Are We Still Using Century-Old Discredited Theories To Explain The Power Of Social Media?

Social media is increasingly described as an all-powerful force shaping societal discourse, capable of toppling governments, swaying elections, promulgating propaganda, maximizing misinformation and undermining the very fabric of democracy. Yet, much of our understanding of the power of social media comes from the discredited propaganda theories of century ago that viewed media platforms as all-powerful tools for controlling populations and shaping societies. Looking beyond the false hype and hyperbole, we see that social media is a lot less powerful than we might think.

For social platforms to lie at the root of every societal ill, from internet addiction to misinformation to foreign influence, would suggest that they have mastered the art of propaganda and behavioral engineering that has eluded humanity almost since the dawn of civilization.

In many ways our fixation on social media’s influence mirrors that of the great societal debate that arose at the dawn of the motion picture era a century ago.

With the rising popularity of movies in the 1920’s and 1930’s and with World War I still fresh on society’s mind, an emerging concern of considerable societal attention was the impact that movies could have on children, leading to the Payne Fund Studies to better understand just how influential movies were on the public.

One of the outcomes of these studies and the retrospective look at wartime propaganda was the conceptualization of media messages as a “magic bullet” that could be “fired” into the minds of the public to convert them to a particular point of view or focus them on a specific narrative, overriding an individual’s existing beliefs and tendencies.

Much as Facebook is described today as having the power to shape the national discourse, flooding us with misinformation, swaying elections and addicting us beyond control, so too was the media once described as having almost limitless power to control the population, both domestically and abroad.

In fact, one of the driving forces behind the Payne Fund Studies was the idea that the novel medium of movies was so powerful that the decisions of a small number of filmmakers could fundamentally rewrite societal norms and tear apart the very fabric of our existence, much as we speak today of social media platforms having that same power.

Similar to today, this “magic bullet” theory arrived at a moment of great technological disruption in which unprecedented new communications technologies were upending the flow of information and the role of gatekeepers.

New technologies were the perfect scapegoats upon which to hang all of society’s problems.

It is well worth returning to the scholarship of the era, in a time when the power of the media was viewed as so great that it could overwhelm a person’s most deeply held convictions.

As Lavine and Wechsler’s famous book “War Propaganda and the United States” offered in 1940, “we live in a propaganda age… public opinion no longer is formulated by the slow process of … shared experience … in our time public opinion is primarily a response to propaganda stimuli.”

Over time this absolute power to overwhelm all beliefs and convictions gave way to a far more nuanced and complex understanding of how societies produce and consume information.

Seminal studies like McComb and Shaw’s 1972 “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media” clarified that media could exert considerable influence by drawing attention to issues, but that those effects were mediated by a complex interdependent web of backgrounds, beliefs and connections.

In an eerily prescient preview of today’s fixation on misinformation, David Riesman observed in 1941 that “[T]he fear of propaganda [has] created a large number of citizens who don’t believe what they read in the papers, and who feel surrounded by conspiracies and lies.” The Librarian of Congress warned at the time that “it is the very simple technique of repeating and repeating and repeating falsehoods, with the idea that by constant repetition and reiteration, with no contradiction, the misstatements will finally come to believed.” As one author summed up the information environment at the time, it was “like a real combat zone, the war of words engendered a fog, a miasma that dazed and confused the otherwise rational participants in the democratic process and drove them paranoid.”

Much as FCC Chairman Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech on the state of television half a century ago raised every one of the issues we today ascribe as novel issues unique to social media, so too did the communications scholars of just under a century ago grapple with the same issues we today see as the exclusive domain of social media.

Read contemporary publications and coverage of the Payne Fund Studies and propaganda theories of the age, replacing the words “mass media” and “propaganda” with “social media” and “behavioral engineering” and even century-old research papers and news articles read as if they were published today.

Study the works of Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld and other figures of the era and one will see that, like Minow’s 1961 television speech, the very concerns we claim today are unprecedented outcomes of social media are merely the age-old issues that arise every half century with the debut of a major new telecommunications technology.

The Magic Bullet theory emerged at a time of great upheaval in the informational landscape, as the new medium of motion pictures represented a technology that was viewed as having almost hypnotic powers to sway populations against their every conviction, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Minow’s 1961 “vast wasteland” speech marked yet another major transition point in which a new technology was upending the natural order of the communications landscape and raising a host of existential societal issues.

Today social media represents the latest technological inflection point and once again we are grappling with all of the same questions we have confronted roughly every 50 years.

It is particularly striking just how closely the current societal conversation about social media has hewed to the discredited theories of a century ago of all-powerful communications mediums and how quickly we’ve forgotten all of the quantitative knowledge we’ve gained in the decades since.

Putting this all together, we are describing the power of social media today in remarkably similar terms as those used a century ago in an era when the media was viewed as all-powerful, capable of everything from toppling governments to influencing elections to promulgating propaganda to maximizing misinformation to addicting us to undermining the very fabric of democracy to beginning and ending wars with a few words.

In the century since, we learned these fears were greatly exaggerated and we developed far more nuanced understandings of the interplay between the public and the communications mediums through which they interact and engage with the world.

Yet, much like the rise of television half a century ago, it seems each great technological revolution is accompanied by the same existential fears that these new tools will rip apart the very fabric of human existence, turning us all into mindless zombies controlled by the airwaves or internet signals.

In the end, perhaps instead of listening to yet another commentator proclaiming how Facebook will be the end of our world, we should spend that time reading works by scholars like Cantril, Lasswell and Lazarsfeld, the quantitative studies like McComb and Shaw’s and reread Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech.

Perhaps seeing that our modern world is not so different from those of the past and that these exact issues seem to resurface every half century or so with the latest communications technology revolution, might help all of us tone down the rhetoric just enough that we can have a rational and informed debate about our digital future.

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