A Research On Robert Ezra Park' Thought Of The Mass Communication

Robert Ezra Park, as the most representative of the Chicago School scholars, is considered the first college researcher of the mass communication. And to some certain extent, Park is also a pioneer in media technology doctrine. This paper employs the text studies, attempting to make some more comprehensive commentary and analysis on his thought, based on the introduction and arrangement of Robert Ezra Park's thought that the mass media and social change and collective behavior and public opinion and on the social environment of the United States at that time.From the methodological point of view, researches of the mass communication by Park are not just a kind of social statistics, but more of a phenomenon based on the observation (Behavioral Science) based on "theoretical and applied research phase of integration.From the point of view of ideological origins, the ideas of Georg Simmel's social interaction, Cabriel Tarde's interpersonal communication, John Dewey's positivism and Charles Horton Cooley's media ideas of technological determinism have great impression on Park's mass communication.Park has research on immigration newspapers, emphasizing the close relationship between communication technologies and social change, and the communication is more viewed as a transmission and a control, namely:the transmission view and control concept of communication. In other words, Park not only views communication as information transmission process, but also as a culture construction of symbols process". He was confident that the technological revolution of the mass media have a powerful role in promoting the society.To a large extent, Park's ideas of the mass communication represents the mainstream of mass communication of the Chicago school and has profound impact on the ideas of the developmental and technological communication of the United States.Park's press control, the theory of collective action and public opinion offers some values to the Chinese Communication Studies on the way of the development. At the academic level, the method which Park integrates the discussion of the theory with applied research is worthwhile being referred and studied by Chinese scholars. At a practical level, Park's theory on the control of the immigration press, as well as the collective behavior can help us to solve the high incidence of group incidents instructively.