Communications and Media

It has been argued for long that the mass would rarely take opinions from ostensible leaders, but they obtain them from people who are much like them. They address situations and speak in the name of these masses.  This paper is a summary of the research and theory that seeks to explain the two-step theory of communication. It gives a brief history of the concept and how the thinking about it may have changed over time. The current state of thinking has been summarized while criticisms and limitations of the theory have been identified.

The theory of two-step of communication theory was introduced in a study which was conducted in the year 1944 that focused on decision making process during a presidential election campaigns. Katz and Lazarsfeld came up with this theory after they discovered that voting behavior on individuals was mostly influenced by informal personal contacts, more than it was influenced by the exposure to radio, newspaper, or other forms of mass communication. In more general terms, informal social relationships played a big part on ways that individuals selected content from the media campaign (University of Twente, 2004).

The theory was first developed by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet when they published a paper that analyzed voters decision making process in the 1940 presidential election campaign. The publication in the peoples choice suggested that any piece of information in the first instance reached opinion leaders who later filtered the information they gathered and channeled it to their associates. The theory in fact asserts that there are two distinct stages in which information from the media is conveyed. In the first place, there are individuals who pay attention to any information from the media, these individuals were referred to as opinion leaders. They receive the information from the media and then pass it to others, but in their own interpretation in addition to the actual content from the media (Baran  Davis, 2003).

According to Griswol (n.d.), the opinion leaders have a very great influence in getting people to change or influence them towards a certain attitude and behavior on certain information. This showed that the flow of mass communication was not as direct as previously held. The earlier interpretation had it that, information from the mass media reached their target group directly. Although much research has been undertaken in the ability of mass media to reach quite a large number of people since 1920s, this communication theory that was first published in The Peoples Choice in 1948, led to a deeper understanding of media-audience relationship dynamics. This led to the conclusion that face to face encounters with people of influence affected people more than the mass media. It was viewed that information from the media flowed to the opinion leaders who then passed it to the other less active portion of the population.

The thinking on this theory started to change when researchers wanted to know the qualities and the scope of extent to which these opinion leaders had influence on their associates. It was found out that the opinion leaders were not always influential, and their level of influence varied with the variation of topic in question. It was also noted that the opinion leaders were well distributed in the community across various groups and social classes. Another important fact that was pointed out in these studies was that the opinion leaders were very much similar to the people in whom they had influence upon (University of Twente, 2004).

The concept that information from the media did not reach the target directly was adopted but the original study was not adopted as it appeared to have various flaws and faults. The researchers had designed an objective way in which the flow of influences would be measured. A major fault was identified in the way in which the researchers dealt with the flow of influences and specifically the methodology deficiencies. However, the theory provided an agreeable explanation for the flow of information from the mass media. It was now believed that the opinion leaders did not replace the media on taking the information to the target, but rather they guided discussions of the media. They acted to reemphasize the role of the group and interpersonal contacts (Baran  Davis, 2003).

Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers gave characteristics of personal contact which intensified the validity of the theory. The characteristics included casualness in which any individual would only tune to a speech on a radio with a specific interest on it, but conversations that pop up are in most cases met by an audience that is open to the conversation. Flexibility to counter resistance is another characteristic where the researchers suggested that in a conversation there is opportunity to counter resistance of which the same is not offered in the media. Personal contact was also seen to carry more trust than media as people would be in a position to judge the genuineness and honesty of the person through body language, voice intonation among others (Lazarsfeld, Berelson  Gaudet, 1948).

Griswol (n.d.), suggests that in personal communication, there can be more persuasion without conviction as friendly insistence in most cases generates action. On the other hand, the formal media lacks this aspect in persuading individuals without really convincing them. Another important characteristic which has greatly acted for personal contact according to the researchers is that there are numerous information channels which appear distracting and confusing to targets of such information. It becomes cumbersome for an individual to evaluate all the information in order to generate relevance and make a decision according to the evaluation. The simpler way to this arduous task remains to be use of a peers analysis in order to make ones decision.

The two-step flow theory of communication has maintained its relevance after more than sixty years since its introduction. In some recent, studies setting of agendas has been addressed as being a component of a two step flow of communication. In these current studies, participants were studied in order to determine their strength of personality. This was done to overcome the difficulties which result from actual flow of communication theory, as attempts were made to determine individuals whose personal communication has impact on agenda setting. This type of individuals was then referred to as the archetypal opinion leaders, and has great control on the flow of information.
This aspect has currently been applied in advertising. The advertising industry is well aware of the existence of influentials, as they are currently referred, and measures are put to ensure that the information has effectively reached these influentials (University of Twente, 2004).

In order to summarize criticisms on this theory, Deutschmann and Danielson warned that the theory should be used with caution on issues regarding mass communication. This was from their findings that initial mass media information was relayed directly to the people and did not need to be conveyed to the target by the opinion leaders. This led to the formation of one-step theory of information. Another theory that emerged was from another criticism that there were more than two steps stages before information finally rested on the target audience. This theory was also known as multi step flow theory of communication or diffusion of innovation theory (Suresh, 2003).