At least four major events or social forces
have encouraged the growth of mass media
research. The first was World War I, which
prompted a need to understand the nature
of propaganda. Researchers working from
a stimulus-response point of view attempted
to uncover the effects of the media on people
(Lasswell, 1927). The media at that time were
thought to exert a powerful influence over their
audiences, and several assumptions were made
about what the media could and could not do.
One theory of mass media, later named the
hypodermic needle model of communication,
suggested that mass communicators need only
“shoot” messages at an audience and those
messages would produce preplanned and almost
universal effects. The belief then was that
all people behave in similar ways when they
encounter media messages. We know now
that individual differences among people rule
out this overly simplistic view