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Introduction to the forum on the retirement of concepts

In the keynote address at the Haifa Workshop on Media Psychology in 2015, Dr Elihu Katz argued that as he approached what he declared would be his actual retirement, perhaps it was time to consider the retirement of some of the concepts that had played important roles in the development of the study of the media during his career. At that time, he proposed five concepts that he felt may need to be retired including opinion leaders, the two-step flow, selectivity, cross-pressure, and the spiral of silence. Given the importance of these concepts to the study of the media across the past half century, the proposal to retire these concepts created quite a stir and there were many discussions during the workshop concerning Professor Katz’s proposal. The energy of these discussions at the Haifa conference prompted a Blue Sky Workshop at the 2016 International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Fukuoka, Japan. Blue Sky Workshops are a newer format at ICA. Unlike traditional sessions at the conference, there are no identified speakers. Rather, the goal of the workshop is for the audience to engage in a critical discussion of the topic for the workshop. In this instance, attendees were charged with considering whether concepts should be retired, and if so, to propose a concept they felt was in need of retirement. The workshop was standing room only (and actually spilled into the hallway). The discussion was stimulating with many different viewpoints expressed. Numerous attendees were opposed to the idea of retiring concepts, yet most participants were able to nominate concepts that they believe had outlived their usefulness and were in need of retirement. The session ended with a commitment to continue these discussions. These discussions focused primarily on theories from the media effects tradition within the discipline. This makes sense because the effects tradition has been one of the dominant approaches to studying the media for well over half a century (Krcmar, Ewoldsen, & Koerner, 2016). The foundations of this approach emerged during the Second World War (Chaffee & Rogers, 1997; Rogers, 1994). In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, the Rockefeller Foundation hosted a series of workshops on the media to begin addressing the future of communication research (Chaffee & Rogers, 1997; Glander, 2009). The memoranda that emerged from the second meeting included a blueprint for Lasswell’s well-known phrase ‘who says what to whom with what effect’, which arguably was the foundation for the effects paradigm that was to emerge after the Second World War. In addition, Karl Hovland’s research on the Why We Fight Films and later his systematic research on persuasion arguably provided the research exemplar for the emerging effects paradigm (Rogers, 1994). Out of Lasswell’s focus on the sequential process of communication and Hovland’s research program, the effects paradigm was formed (Sproule, 2008). While the effects paradigm has gone through a number of iterations, it still directs much of our research and theorizing on the media (Lang, 2013). But recently there have been a number of challenges to the effects paradigm (Jensen & Neuman, 2013; Lang, 2013; Lang & Ewoldsen, 2010; McQuail, 2013; Wang, 2011). The arguments for why researchers need to move beyond the effects model are varied. The alternatives argued that the effects model ignores the media systems found in nonWestern countries (Wang, 2011), does not accurately explain the interactive nature of new