The paper for which Lazarsfeld and Merton is best known is their "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action" (1948). Widely anthologized, the paper has been proposed as a canonical text in media studies. Lazarsfeld and Merton set out to understand the burgeoning public interest in problems of the "media of mass communication". After a critical consideration of common and problematic approaches to the mass medianoting that the "sheer presence of these media may not affect our society so profoundly as is widely supposed"they work their work through three aspects of what they see as the problem. They highlight three "social functions" that cast a long shadow into the present day. The first of these is social status conferral function, or the way that the "mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations and social movements". The second function is the "enforcement of social norms", where the mass media uses public exposure of events or behaviour, to expose "deviations from these norms to public view". The third function, and perhaps best known, is the narcotizing dysfunction, in which energies of individuals in society are systematically routed away from organized actionbecause of the time and attention needed to simply keep up with reading or listening to mass media: "Exposure to this flood of information may serve to narcotize rather than to energize the average reader or listener."