Our Future Research Agenda: Confronting Challenges… Or Our Dying Grasp?

Mass communication as a problem should not be confused, as it often is, with one of its solutions: the mass media. We might invent other solutions as we look for a way to think together, to produce a viable democratic public. Experiments in democratic behavior, conducted in a research and development context, could lead to applicable principles and to the construction of “information utilities.” These would furnish help with self-informing, along with informational data bases. Equating mass communication with mass media invites the risk of economic success for mass media … and societal failure for mass communication—a dying grasp for journalism.