The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the Cold War era, the Middle East was a battleground for a fierce ideological contest between the United States and the USSR.The two nations struggled to win the hearts and minds of the "new nations" of the postcolonial world by providing them with modernization projects.It was a war to entice the emerging nations into two differing versions of modernity.Part of the war was fought through the provision of development aid, but the main rivalry was pursued over the air waves, via mass media: specifically, in the competition between Radio Moscow and Voice of America (VOA).In 1949, VOA, funded by the State Department, commissioned the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University to conduct a survey on the radio-listening habits of people in the six Middle Eastern countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iran.The purpose of the study was to help VOA beat its Soviet competitor in influencing public opinion in the Middle East.Daniel Lerner (1917Lerner ( -1980)), an experienced propagandist, was one of the main figures who led the survey.He wrote several reports on the project and produced a book on the theory of modernization and mass media.The book, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, was a breakthrough in the field of communication studies.It argued that exposure to media messages would facilitate the transition of Muslim societies from tradition to modernity.More than 50 years after its publication, Lerner's monograph remains a seminal text in what, in the field of communication studies, is known as development communication.Hemant Shah's new book, The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society, is an engaging account of Lerner's career trajectory and the theoretical influences behind the production of The Passing.Shah argues that, despite the popularity of Lerner's modernization theory, its genesis has not yet been thoroughly explored by media scholars.Shah situates The Passing and its author in the three interlinked contexts: cold war geopolitics, the emergence of behavioral sciences, and post-war racial liberalism.The book draws extensively on archival records, Lerner's other publications, official documents, and interviews with some of Lerner's colleagues.Organizing the volume in six chapters, Shah structures his study around Lerner's institutional locations.The first chapter provides a general background on the topic; the second chapter explores Lerner's career as a military propaganda analyst during the Second World War.It was during his time working in the Psychological Warfare Division, an institution staffed with social scientists, that he learned the effectiveness of mass media in prompting social change.The third chapter is about Lerner at Stanford and his engagement with a large research project at the Hoover Institute.The fourth chapter provides a detailed account of the VOA project at Columbia University, during which Lerner formulated his modernization theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".