⟩ Which developments in your field do you think have been most important or influential?
The move away from a focus on social order that characterized functionalism; from ‘how do you maintain order?’ to ‘how do you achieve more equality?’ In the communication field, it’s a major move away from mechanical models of communication. Now it’s just far more complicated with much more emphasis on how people process messages and reconstruct them. So, one of the key ways to characterize the communications field is whether or not you think the media are ‘all powerful’ or ‘not at all powerful’. My answer is: neither. Under some conditions they are all powerful; under other conditions, they’re not.