ABSTRACT
The three texts in this section draw upon the process enabling the birth of a scientific paradigm and upon the turn taken by the entire field under the influence of this birth. This is why they may be seen, by analogy, as “mythical” narrations of the creation of the mass communication science. Elihu Katz outlines the beginnings as in a cosmogonic myth: the intuitions of sociologists such as Georg Simmel or Robert Park or psychologists such as Gabriel Tarde and the pioneering work of Columbia School forge the universe to which the subsequent thought schools will adhere, categorized (totemically) into four great scholarly families. I am tempted to interpret Kurt Lang’s and Gladys Engel Lang’s text as a Promethean myth in which the monumental paths opened by golden age thinkers (Alexis de Toqueville, Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Gabriel Tarde, Karl Buecher) are put aside by the new generation which, despite the efforts to build a complex theoretical system, provide a unidimensional model that “fails to take adequate account of the reciprocities and interactions through which the members of a society construct their images of social reality” (p. 16). Meanwhile, Gertrude Robinson proposes a heroic myth of the (forgotten) pioneers of this science—women who worked in Bureau of Social Research—and thanks to whom (i.e., thanks to their gender-determined vision) some of the hypotheses or maybe even some of the guidelines of the first media-effect theory took shape. Beyond this turn to the origins, as in a mythical construction, the three chapters intersect in many ways and probably reflect the consensus in our field reached after more than half a century of scientific research and critical reflection in mass communication science.
