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Theories of Cybersociety 59
insisted that mass communication needed a different methodological
approach from personal communication makes his work useful for
analysing broadcast. Lasswell was interested in the influence of commu-
nication structures on society as a whole. His most general and famous
adage was: Who says what, in which channel, to whom and with what effect?
Lasswell’s framing of communication theory in this way proliferated into
an array of sub-branches looking at content, control, audience and impact.
But his guiding principles came from functionalist sociology, which
recognized communication institutions as important in the regulation of
social relations, and therefore in need of monitoring, improvement and
policy so as to avoid ‘dysfunction’. These principles address the role that
communication processes can play in social reproduction. Mass commu-
nication, in particular, provides an inventory of public messages which
allow social values to be monitored. In large-scale settings of social inte-
gration a media-generated consensus around social values enables better
integration between society’s institutions as well as maintenance of tradi-
tions and respect for the past.
Lasswell’s work might be seen as articulating Durkheim’s reference
to communication, in the nineteenth century, as a material social fact
which provides one of the ingredients of social solidarity and dynamic
density: ‘... the number and nature of the elementary parts of which soci-
ety is composed, the way they are arranged, the degree of coalescence
they have attained, the distribution of population over the surface of the
territory, the number and nature of channels of communication, the form
of dwelling etc.’ (Durkheim, 1982: 58). Like Durkheim, Lasswell also con-
tinued the nineteenth-century sociological dichotomy of society versus
the individual in which communication is treated entirely as a social fact,
that is, ‘a category of fact with distinctive characteristics: it consists of
ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and
endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him’
(Durkheim, 1982: 52).
This dualism of society or ‘system’ versus the individual as the basic
unit of the functionalist paradigm is successful to the degree to which
‘media’ are considered a continuation of social forms by technical means
(see previous chapter), but it runs into difficulties when particular media
are seen to be constitutive of new social forms (see the discussion of
McLuhan below).
Whatever Lasswell’s political aspirations as a reformer, his work has
the merit of offering a general theory of communication that spans broad-
cast and network. Today the legacy of the Lasswellian approach, com-
bined with the information thinkers, can be seen in the various discourses
that try to grapple with CMC in the vast assortment of perspectives which
are all nevertheless framed by process models: the user perspective,
the content perspective, economic and political perspectives and control
perspectives.