The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis

Introduction

Mass communication rooted from the term communis that meant a communion or the idea of shared understanding . By the time it was the late 17th century , it became the notion of exchanging information and the notion of imparting or conveying it . Both definitions that had developed regarding communication could not exclude each other . While there was a conveyance of information , there should also be shared understanding Transmission or communication alone could not sustain society . Society continued to exist in transmission as well as in communication . More than being connected by

a language , men belong to a community because they have things in common and communication was the manner by which they share this commonality . However , communication was also dependent on the person 's ability to interpret and understand the symbols . The capacity to interpret communicative behavior was bounded by distinct boundaries

There demassification of the different forms of communication that was observed in today 's society . Cable systems had dramatically increased the number of channels to choose from and the Internet was perceived to cause the extinction of print and broadcasting outfits . Most theorists discussed the growth and capacity of the Internet and its tendency to wipe out any other mass media because it was almost free or available at a very little cost . Moreover , the wide choices that were available online could diminish the common communication environment that created the people as a society

In the year 1970 , Phillip Tichenor and his colleagues published a study of the structure or public affairs "Mass media flow and differential growth in knowledge " They coined the term knowledge gap ' and referred it to the failure of mass media to inform the public at large the way they should . However , this was referred to as a product of the social structure of mass communication

Knowledge-Gap Hypothesis

Background

Tichenor and his colleagues believed that the members of the society did not proportionally acquire the increase of information in it . Those who had higher socioeconomic status had the better ability to acquire information . The disproportion created a division between the group of better-educated people who were information-rich or knew more about most things and those who were less educated or the information-poor . There was a backfire observed in the efforts to improve the distribution of information through mass media . The plan of distributing the information to everybody did not work since there were people were receiving more and more of it while there was the other group who was receiving less and less information . It was seen to increase the difference gap between people of different social classes . While the society existed because of the commonality of information they receive , this hypothesis was seen to diminish such commonality

The Information Revolution in the 1960s was seen to capture the transformation of society drawing from the idea of information . It was the metaphor of the time . Everything was reduced to information metaphorically and practically . There was an effort to digitalize all phenomena . The discovery of...