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58 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
of communication is in postulating what ‘a message’ actually is. For Gerbner,
a message never exists in some kind of raw state waiting to be coded, sent,
then decoded. Rather, the practice of coding is itself part of what a mes-
sage is. The revelation that accompanies this, however, is that the medium
in which a message is sent is itself a part of the coding and therefore
of the message – the means and control dimension of communication. The
innovation which Gerbner makes therefore is in critiquing the idea that
the medium or form of communication merely conveys, transports or
transmits the message. Instead, the message is always already a part of
the form.
In also making the listener, viewer or receiver more active in the
process of communication, Gerbner introduces two new concepts: access
and availability. The first refers to the social and technical conditions for
access to a communication medium. In the second media age, not every-
one can afford Internet access. First World ownership of television is high,
but access to the transmission of messages is extremely low for most people.
With the concept of availability, Gerbner points towards the closure of
communication at the point of the production of a message. Before the age
of mass media, the availability of ‘information’ was confined to relatively
privileged or cloistered groups of intellectuals who had the literacy skills
denied to the majority. In totalitarian political regimes, the population
may be entirely literate but the central organization of power is based
around the dissemination of selective publications, which has earned the
title of propaganda. Here the selectivity and lack of availability of alter-
native literature, rather than what it says, is what makes it propaganda.
Critics of propaganda seldom appreciate this fact, putting the influence of
the material down to its ‘highly charged’ ideological character. Paradoxically,
the same publication, when disseminated in democracies offering free
speech, can be heralded as positive proof of this speech rather than derided,
as it might be elsewhere.
Gerbner’s insights, in taking the hypodermic model to extended
lengths, offer some revelations about media ‘form’ to which we can return
later. Nevertheless it should be pointed out that Gerbner still did not depart
from the dyadic positions of the transmission models of communication.
The problem with positivist transmission models of communication
is that they assume that all communication occurs in a vacuum without
appreciation of the social and cultural contexts involved. For example,
largely absent from transmission accounts is an appreciation that the
‘success’ of any particular communication depends on the degree to which
interlocutors might share a common culture.
There are some limited exceptions to this in the models of Lasswell
(1948) and Newcomb (1953). With Lasswell, the addressee is widened to
include mass communication. Because of this fact, Lasswell’s model has
been a popular foundation paper for traditions in media studies, particu-
larly the ‘effects’ tradition and audience studies. The fact that Lasswell