KNOWLEDGE GAP THEORY:Criticism on Marshal McLuhan

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

LESSON 37

KNOWLEDGE GAP THEORY

Criticism on Marshal McLuhan

Criticism within academia was that his ideas were too diverse and inconsistent.

They were astounded by his notion that literacy was obsolete and found his praise of nonlinear thinking

nonsensical or even dangerous. They thought nonlinear thinking was just another label for logically

inconsistent random thoughts.

Empirical media researchers were also uniformly critical of McLuhan.

The early small scale empirical studies failed to support his assertions, these suspicions were confirm,

his was just another grand theorist whose ideas were overly speculative and empirically unverifiable.

Evens critical cultural theorists criticized his work. These theorists found McLuhan's theory to be a

perversion of Innis' ideas. Rather than attempt reform of the superstructure or lead a revolution to take

control of the base, McLuhan was content to wait for technology to lead us forward into the global

village.

He seemed to be saying that our fate is in the hands of media technology, and we are constrained to go

where ever it leads. The political economists were this as encouraging and sanctioning the development

of potentially dangerous new forms of electronic media, which might lead to a painful future- a

nightmare global village in which one is constantly watched and coerced by remote elites. As long as

existing elites remain in power, political economists saw little hope for positive change.

They condemned McLuhan for diverting attention from more important work and perverting the radical

notions found in Innis' writing.

Knowledge Gap Theory

Scholars like Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien in 1986 developed a theory of society in which mass media

and the use of media messages play a central role. This model focuses on the role played by news media

in cities and towns of various sizes. These areas are conceptualized as subsystems within larger state

and regional social systems. The team began by empirically establishing that news media systematically

inform some segments of the population, specifically persons in higher socioeconomic groups, better

than the media inform others theory.

Overtime, the differences between the better informed and the less informed segments tend to grow

the knowledge gap between them gets larger and larger. This team conducted numerous surveys for 25

years to develop and support its. But just how should these knowledge gaps be interpreted? Do they

pose long term problems of subsystems or for the overall system? Could knowledge gaps actually be

functional in some way? If we rely on classical democratic libertarian theory to answer these questions,

knowledge gaps are troubling; we can be concerned that the people who are less well informed will not

be able to act as responsible citizens. If they act at all they will do so, based on ignorance. On the other

hand, if we use elite pluralism theory to speculate about the consequences of knowledge gaps, we are

less concerned, after all there is a strong correlation between political ignorance and political apathy.

If the less informed don't vote, then they can't upset the system, as long as there is an active, informed

minority of societal leaders, the overall system should function smoothly- problems should be resolved

by this elite based on their superior knowledge

These scholars recognized that documenting the existence of knowledge gaps was only the first step in

assessing media's role in social systems at various levels.

In the next phase of their research, the team explored the long-term implications of knowledge gaps for

the operation of local communities by studying the role played by news media when communities

confront social conflicts. Would news media enable communities to effectively resolve these conflicts

or would the conflicts be exacerbated (intensified)? What would happen to knowledge gaps?

The researcher studied conflicts in 19 different cities that were debating environmental pollution,

wilderness logging, and the construction of high voltage power lines; these conflicts could have been

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

resolved in several ways. If the elite pluralism perspective was accurate, news media would only inform

a politically active minority and this group would control the conflict and resolve it. If classical

democratic libertarian theory was accurate, news media would inform everyone and the conflict would

be resolved through negotiation and public debate. In fact, neither of these older theories was very

useful in predicting what happened, a more complicated, systems theory based perspective proved

useful in interpreting the empirical findings.

In nearly every case, conflicts were initiated by external agents, local leaders, including newspaper

publisher, were often co-opted by powerful regional businesses such as electrical power companies or

big manufactures , the research team found that as conflicts escalated, more and more groups were

activated from all segments of a community, even normally apolitical or apathetic people were

eventually drawn into as escalating conflict, news coverage of conflict-related issues increased, but

within same communities, most of the information came from outside media local media either avoided

reporting about conflicts or severely limited their reports, little useful information was provided, as

time passed, ordinarily uninformed individuals made better use of outside news media related to the

conflict.

Thus, the knowledge gap tended to narrow between those population segments that were initially well

informed about these issues and those that were ignorant.

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