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Argues that if mass communications researchers continue to largely disregard the research potential of the Internet, their theories about communication will become less useful. Proposes a conceptualization of the Internet as a mass medium, based on revised ideas of what constitutes a mass audience and a mediating technology. (SR)

Presents a dialog between the two editors of this issue, discussing and debating why communication researchers should study the Internet, and how the topic can be conceptually constrained. (SR)

Discusses several weak spots in critical communication research. Argues that critical communication scholars should privilege journalism, engage in activism, and incorporate capitalism into the heart of their calculations. (SR)

Looks at arguments about the lineage of the field of mass communication, identifying and discussing three major discernable positions. (SR)

Maintains that to study communication is to make arguments about the economic logic and cultural forms of social development. Discusses why the study of communication as a social force has converged at many points on an encompassing critique of contemporary capitalism. Maintains that the literature of social history will be of prime relevance in formal communications scholarship. (SR)

Suggests that over the next 20 years the evolution of communication technologies may offer a critical opportunity for researchers to positively shape the channels of mediated human communication. Focuses on communication research's role in new communication media. Sketches out a possible research response: a "human factors approach" to communication research. (SR)

Challenges the increasingly comfortable relationship between cultural studies and communication, in which cultural studies has compromised itself by remaking itself within the image of communication studies. Advocates a cultural studies built on the concept of articulation. (SR)

Argues for a more interdisciplinary approach to journalism scholarship to provide a fuller account of media power. Considers briefly the notions of performance, narrative, ritual, and interpretive community as alternative frames through which to consider journalism. (SR)

Uses the idea of "framing" as a case study of scattered conceptualization across academic disciplines. Identifies and makes explicit various uses of "framing." Argues that the field of communication can develop a core of knowledge that could translate into research models contributing to social theory in the largest sense. (SR)

Suggests that the reason important parts of the communication field have failed to engage developments within communications is because of a rapid march up the blind alley of cultural studies. Relates the authors' experience working with the Broadcasting Research Unit in London to suggest some of the ways in which policy and policy debates can, and cannot, be influenced. (SR)

Discusses five key assumptions of critical scholarship on development communication: development communication must liberate; women's perspective as a basis for development communication; context defines women's perspective; context is understood in dialogue; and dialog must engage many levels and types of power. (SR)

Argues that, because of its heavy technological emphasis, telecommunications will tend toward instrumental, applied forms of research. Notes alternative research traditions that see telecommunications as part of the social history of communications technology. Discusses implications for the contemporary study of telecommunications. (SR)

Proposes a framework to join journalists and communications scholars in dialog about conditions that best promote public dialoge of democracy itself. Sketches a news policy model, reviews research indicating areas of agreement about the dynamics of press-government-public interactions, and looks at steps toward a field of study built around these emerging perspectives. (SR)

Discusses why communications studies are not well poised to deal with some of the issues of the new information order that is emerging or to have an impact on it. Identifies some issues and trends for the future. (SR)

Argues that the study of media economics should stand at the core of the field of communication. Describes central concerns to be addressed, such as economic influence and effect, economic structure and conduct, and analysis of performance. (SR)

Advocates that communication scholars explore more deeply the work of Emile Durkheim. Explores Durkheim and communication studies, and Durkheimian contributions to communication theory, viewing every corner of social life as communicatively founded. (SR)

Identifies five overarching values central to disciplinary disputes in communication, and how their relative importance changes depending on prevailing social, economic, and intellectual conditions. Explores discipline-level values in the 1980s, and how value structures are likely to shift in the 1990s. Proposes a value hierarchy for the future. (SR)

Argues that scholars in communication studies, rather than engaging questions about "the field" or "the divide," should instead ask questions about who they are, and who they become, when they engage in certain kinds of communication inquiry--ontological questions about epistemological consequences. (SR)

Considers how the troubles affecting the field of communication are linked to the decline of modernism. Argues that the future of the field lies in exploring both microscopic and macroscopic social changes in a postmodern world. Proposes an agenda for this research. (SR)

Discusses particular tensions within the area of interpersonal communication theory and research surrounding the study of social and personal relationships. Argues that important issues have been ignored as scholars pursue a spurious conflict between communication science and communication hermeneutics. (SR)

Discuses three developmental stages of the information society: the electrification of communication, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century; converging technologies and awareness of information, beginning in the late middle twentieth century; and, beginning in the 1990s, the harmonization of information systems with each other. Discusses communication research in the harmonized network society. (SR)

Uses three quotations from Gregory Bateson to inform the author's comments on the discipline of communication. Argues that communication teachers and scholars must aim for a curriculum and a mode of study, research, and teaching that leads to means of recognizing, addressing, and responding to truly significant questions, rather than disciplinary, method-driven questions. (SR)

Claims that the field of communication is moving beyond theorizing that treats communication as a process, to what might be called "multiple-process theory." Examines views of message-processing modes and effects, enlarges the scope of inquiry by considering a multiplicity of levels of analysis, and discusses a philosophical orientation compatible with multiple-process theory. (SR)

Comments on the attempt to construct a coherent intellectual viewpoint to span the disparate projects of interpersonal and mass communication research. Considers how the discipline of communication can construct functional representations of itself despite diversity. (SR)

Attributes the lack of disciplinary status accorded communication to the lack of ontological status granted the very idea of communication in modernity. Argues that the field should deny modernity's bifurcation by asserting that communication is foundational and attempt to forward a unique communication ontology. (SR)

Argues that communication research needs to move toward better integration of observations on the microlevel with systemic generalizations about macrolevel phenomena, and reorient research away from the media behavior and responses of individuals and toward the cumulative consequences of media behavior over time. (SR)

Suggests that much of communication scholarship has been message driven and that this dominant form of explaining what communication is or does is slowly being challenged by reflexive explanations, which see humans as cognitively autonomous beings, reflexive practitioners of communication with others, and morally responsible interveners in the social realities they live. (SR)

Argues that, to make itself more central to studies in its own field, American communication should embrace its traditional, albeit now greatly expanded, subject matter (communication), while at the same time abandoning all institutional vestiges of its narrow and long outmoded approaches to the field. (SR)

Argues that both the increased theoretical productivity in the field of communication as well as the increased confusion about theory are best explained by the influence of a third variable: a general transformation of the human sciences characterized by blurred genres. (SR)

Uses a typology to characterize the situation in communication research in 1993 as compared to the situation in 1983. Compares previous predictions to the present situation and makes new predictions. Argues that a cause for the fragmentation in communication studies is the lack of a basic precondition for cumulative growth--formal models. (SR)

Argues that a fair amount of confusion in media studies has resulted from the lack of explicit treatment of the most basic question: What are media? Suggests three underlying metaphors: media as conduits, media as languages, and media as environments. (SR)

Argues that the issue of difference is at the root of the problems in the field of communication. Maintains that it is how the differences that characterize human beings, their symbolic lives, and their symbolic products are treated that confounds the field. Discusses the methodological moves involved in locating something defined as difference. (SR)