Mass Communication and Information Diffusion 349 Mass Communication and Information Diffusion JOHN P. ROBINSON 1 Social commentators and observers of the changes in modern society are continually amazed by mounting evidence of an incredible increase in the information that flows through society. The rapid diffusion of the electrical devices of radio, television, and more recently the computer, is usually taken as the most impressive evidence on this score, and incipient innovations such as cable television, home video recorders and computer terminals promise to accelerate this "information explosion" even more rapidly in the not-too-distant future. Moreover other indicators point to much the same conclusion: the tremendous proliferation of magazine and book titles over the last 25 years, the increasing audience for education television, and, for the critics of the "vast wasteland" of commercial television, reports from experienced kindergarten and first grade teachers that their students come to school with far greater verbal skills and wider interests than their predecessors. Against such an impressive array of evidence, elements of which are well wired into the conventional wisdom, the mass communication researcher usually encounters at best a skeptical audience to his proclamation that research fails to corroborate any such Utopian effects of the media. To be sure, the researcher does find that people already well informed can become better informed by attention to the media, but for any particular topic these people do constitute a small, and often insignificant, segment of the total mass audience. Such results are consistent with findings from research into the media's effects on audience propensity to engage in violent behavior, to "Mass Communication and Information Diffusion" by John Robinson is reprinted from Current Perspectives in Mass Communication Research (Sage Annual Reviews of Communication Research, Vol. 1), f. Gerald Kline and Phillip J. Tichenor, eds., copyright 1972. pp. 71-93, by permission of the Publisher, Sage Publications, Inc. 348 become unduly swayed in their political or electoral decisions, to become less intellectually active as a response to the easier availability of media fare, as summarized in Klapper's (1960) famous summary of the research literature: Regardless of the condition in question—be it the vote intentions of audience members, their tendency toward or away from delinquent behavior, or their general orientation toward life and its problems—the media are more likely to reinforce than to change. But converging evidence of this sort is still likely to be of little consolation to persons conditioned to the argument that modern man's increased exposure to media1 and other information sources has inevitably resulted in him becoming more informed, occasionally to the point of information overload, than he was in prior eras. Public opinion researchers have perhaps uncovered the most persuasive evidence of the failure of all segments of the population to share in the information explosion, with their documentation of the shocking ignorance of the American public on matters of basic national concern. In 1964, half of a national sample were unaware of the existence of two Chinas with their opposing political loyalties (Robinson, 1967). In 1969, a CBS survey found only a third of the country had heard of the Kerner Commission Report. In a 1970 national survey, less than a third of the population could provide even rudimentary identification of Ralph Nader, Robert Finch, or Martha Mitchell (Robinson, 1972). Collections of further items on which the public seems ill informed have been provided in Lane and Sears (1964), Erskine (1962, 1963a, 1963b), Schramm and Wade (1967) and Robinson (1967). Moreover the evidence has been slowly accumulating that more directly links these discouraging information levels to a dearth of information flow from the media to the public, even if one talks only of the actual audience for any given message and excludes the usual majority of the public who are not in the audience at the time of the message. McLeod and Swinehart (1960) found almost no increase in public awareness of the detailed scientific purpose of space satellites six months after extensive media coverage of the implications of the launching of Sputnik I. Robinson and Hirsch (1969) found teenagers unable to describe even the basic themes, much less the subtle meanings, of the lyrics in various popular "message" songs which had received maximum exposure on Top 40 radio stations and which most teenagers indeed claimed to have heard. More disturbing is Stern's (1971) finding that half the audience of a national network news program could not recall even one of the 19 news stories on the program shortly after they were broadcast. . . . Now to some extent, the above collection of research is an exaggeration to make a point seldom acknowledged in intellectual debates about the power of the media. Mass communication and public opinion researchers do have evidence of apparently successful transmission of information from the media to the public. Some of these will be examined later in the article. Thus, in 350 MASS MEDIA EFFECTS the McLeod and Swinehart investigation (I960), the proportion of the population able to describe the less detailed purposes for satellites doubled (although only from 8 to 16 percent) and those larger proportions of the population who saw satellites as the basis of a race with the Russians may have been simply reflecting the framework in which the news media interpreted the importance of Sputnik I. It is unlikely that widespread public awareness of the dangers of cigarette smoking, the signs of cancer, or the causes of forest fires would be possible without the torrent of public service announcements through the media. Public opinion researchers find so few people unable to complete the beginnings of commercial slogans and jingles (Ward, 1972) that they can hardly dismiss the power of media advertising. . . . How has it been possible for researchers to compile such a dismal scorecard on the effectiveness of the media in conveying news information? One researcher, William McPhee (1956) developed the following line of explanation: Imagine trying to transmit complex and sophisticated knowledge to students who walk in and out as they please, when some of the most valuable effects might occur to a passerby who wanders in by chance, when most volunteer students already know what is to be learned, while those who do not already know are not available, when motivation is low, and when neither the subjects nor the teacher have any clear idea about the rewards for learning. To this, one might add the coping and perceptual mechanisms whereby the public protects itself from the bombardment of media information to which it is exposed. It has been estimated, that the average American is exposed to hundreds of messages just about advertising on an average day. Add to this all the "bad news" messages propagated by the news media and it is not difficult to imagine why the audience is highly selective about what news it chooses' to attend to or seek out in the media. More fundamental reasons may be involved. News changes daily a,nd . hence cannot be packaged as neatly as a classroom lecture. It is not difficult to imagine that news messages and arguments, designed by news personnel who have undergone considerable exposure to the disciplines of advanced education, could be too difficult to comprehend by a mass audience composed of less than 15 percent college graduates. Moreover, few news stories would seem to provide the fuel for as lively interpersonal conversation among peers in the general public as it would among average members of the news profession, and communications research offers ample evidence of interpersonal conversation being a more powerful transmission mechanism than the media (Weiss, 1970), even among the elites, in our society (Bauer et al., 1963). The research evidence in the following section can be conveniently explained by and subsumed under the above type of arguments. However, while most research results are consistent with this formulation, which builds upon a model of a series of segmented media audiences who tend to become increasingly dissimilar from one another, a significant body of research points to Mass Communication and Information Diffusion 351 quite different processes of information Sow that may operate under certain conditions. These divergent research findings and conditions are then reviewed in the subsequent section, before some final'implications and conclusions are drawn. Media Usage and Information Levels There are, first of all, strong linkages that are found between media usage and information. Briefly stated, heavier users of print media are better informed than light users or nonusers.2 It is immediately obvious, however, that there are intervening audience factors that need to be taken into account in such a formulation. Of the several factors in the audience itself, research indicates that the extent of the audience member's exposure to formal education is the most powerful factor intervening between media usage and information level. For example, Figure 1 breaks the American population down into six groups that were maximally different in terms of their information about the Far East in 1964 (Robinson, 1967). The information index was based on answers to the following four questions: 1. What kind of government does most of China have? 2. Have you heard anything about another Chinese government? 3. Has the U.S. been treating China and Russia the same or differently? 4. Have you heard anything about the fighting in Vietnam? The average score in the population on this index, which runs between 0 (no correct answers) and 4 (four correct answers), was 2.2, a score not significantly better than what could be achieved by unembarrassed guesswork on the part of a respondent. Group I (that 9 percent of the sample who were nonwhites with less than a high school education, earning under $7,500 per year) averaged just over half of one of the four questions correct compared to that 10 percent of the sample in Group VI (college graduates in white-collar jobs) who achieved a nearly perfect score of 3.6 items correct. While other factors were important in predicting public knowledge of these items,3 it is obvious from Figure 1 that education was the dominant factor in distinguishing the six group? in terms of their information levels. Thus, when one finds significant parallel differences in mass media usage among these six groupings of the population, one strongly suspects that education is the major factor at work here as well. The data are presented in Table 1 and show proportions of a 1958 national sample* claiming various usage of the media. While only 1 percent of persons in the Group I category reported reading a nonfiction book in the previous year, almost one in four persons in Group VI did. Even readership of Look and Life, "magazines for people who can't read," was four times higher in Group VI than in FIGURE 1. Combinations of Background Factors for Each of the Six Groups Within the United States Population Showing Large Differences in Information Scores About the Far East Less Than High School Grad Under $7,000 Per Year Non-While White Population High School Grad Over $7,500 Some College Over $4,000 U nder $4,000 1 HI IV College Grad Blue Collar White Collar VI Percent of Population Average Information Score 2? 1.7 29 2.S 3.2 3.6 Note: Percentage of population estimates are based on the ,'"iffftWft'.t*>" T" Ml"'