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608 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2006)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0608 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction By PETER SIMONSON Robert K. Merton (1968, 36-37) once wrote that any classic text worth reading is worth rereading periodically, for what is communi- cated by the printed page changes as a result of changes in the readers and the worlds they inhabit. This volume takes that dictum seriously, revisiting a classic book on the fiftieth anniver- sary of its publication. Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications came out in 1955 and quickly made an impact in the partially overlapping fields of communica- tions, public opinion research, political science, and marketing. It became the canonical statement of the two-step flow of communication-the idea that mass media flow to opinion leaders and from them via face-to-face talk to others around them-but it was also a number of other things as well. Harold Lasswell (1951, 295) believed the influential are those who get the most of what there is to get. If that is true, Personal Influence is an influential text, for over the years it has gotten what there is to get for an academic book: attention, readers, citations, professional status, extensions, criticisms. Kurt and Gladys Lang trace its reception and diffu- sion in this volume, from its emergence at the institutional center of postwar American sociol- ogy, Columbia University, and the Bureau of Applied Social Research. The Bureau, as those who worked there called it, was a remarkable Peter Simonson studies the history and social philosophy of mass communication. He teaches courses in rhetoric and social thought at the University of Colorado. NOTE: I gratefully acknowledge former executive edi- tor Robert W Pearson for making publication of this volume possible. I had high hopes for the papers that would come out of the October 2005 conference at Columbia University, but the articles that follow surpassed what I could have imagined at the time. I want to thank Elihu Katz for agreeing to the project. DOI: 10.1177/0002716206292527 ANNALS, AAPSS, 608, November 2006 6

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