Media and Society: The Role of Media in The Social World
Media and Society: The Role of Media in The Social World
Media and Society: The Role of Media in The Social World
1. Is elegant and
descriptive 1. Is difficult to verify
2. Allows for systems empirically
orientation 2. Meaning and power of
3. Integrates microscopic dependency are unclear
and macroscopic theory 3. Lacks power in
4. Explains role of media explaining long-term
during crisis and social effects
change
The Knowledge Gap
• Agenda Setting The idea that media don’t tell people what to think, but
what to think about
• Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922), argued that the people do not
deal directly with their environments as much as they respond to
“pictures” in their heads. “For the real environment is altogether too big,
too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not
equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many
permutations and combinations.
Agenda setting 2
• Priming In agenda-setting, the idea that media draw attention to
some aspects of political life at the expense of others
• Agenda Building A collective process in which media, government,
and the citizenry reciprocally influence one another in areas of
public policy
• Framing theory Idea that people use sets of expectations to make
sense of their social world and media contribute to those
expectations
• Second-order agenda-setting The idea that media set the public’s
agenda at a second level or order—the attribute level (“how to
think about it”), where the first order was the object level (“what to
think about”)
• Frames In framing theory, a specific set of expectations used to
make sense of some aspect of the social world in a specific situation
and time
The Spiral of Silence