The capacity of a national society to adjust to rapidly changing technoeconomic, sociocultural, and political changes depends greatly on its collective capacity to generate, ingest, reach out for, and utilize a vast amount of new and relevant information. This capacity for creative and innovative response to changing conditions and new challenges, the "learning capacity" of a nation, is not limited to the cognitive level, but includes the attitudinal, institutional, and organizational levels of society as well. The mass impact of modern communications makes it incumbent on the communicator to bring out the societal potential of the new advances in communications technology. Modern communications ought to be used in ways that will maintain and strengthen the essential pluralism of our societies; ensure greater capacity and opportunity for the weak, poor, and underinformed to participate in decision making; and facilitate mass education, using technology to facilitate open learning systems. Communications research should deal systematically with the communications impact on whole cultures and on macroprocesses of social change. (DF)