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opinion leaders. Such influential people (perhaps the elites) receive the information
from printed media, and in turn spread it further through direct interpersonal
contacts, which is ultimately more influential than communication only through a
medium such as almanacs. This type of multi-step framework is useful in
demonstrating that media’s impact is usually indirect, limited, and dependent on
oral retransmission. 60 Applied to colonial propaganda in almanacs, newspapers, and
pamphlets, these models suggest that the direct effects on the readers were
primarily limited to determining what was topical, indirectly influencing the public
through interpersonal conversations and reinforcement of existing political
opinions.
The greatest influence that the expanding world of print media had on
eighteenth-century Virginia was not through the content on its pages at all. The
words that were printed did not have a direct, “magic bullet” type of influence, but
rather a limited effect moderated by existing opinions. The almanacs of the
Chesapeake region actually had a larger impact on the overall society through their
role as one part of a watershed transition to a culture whose communication
became dominated by print media. As the almanacs helped to spread the printed
word and the subtle changes that accompany such a medium far down the social
structure and far out to the edges of European settlements, the society slowly
transformed. Reading, writing, and the thought processes that accompany such had
tremendous individual and social impact, eventually shaking up the political
structure. Several scholars refer to a “reading revolution” that occurred during the
eighteenth century. 61 According to a British historian of almanacs, the widely
60 Kraus, Effects of Mass Communication on Political Behavior, Severin, Communication
Theories, and Peters, “Democracy and American Mass Communication Theory,” 214.
61 David Hall, “The Atlantic Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Hugh Amory and
Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
152-154, William J. Gilmore, “Literacy, the Rise Of An Age Of Reading, and The Cultural
Grammar Of Print Communications In America, 1735-1850,” Communication 11 no.1 (1988):
23-46, Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), vii.