An anecdote of technology change.
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Paper Conference Schedule
Here are the paper confabs times.
Bring in copies of your paper – enough for everyone in your group and me. They can be two-sided.
We will meet in my office – Weimer 3058
Group 1: 9-11 a.m. Thursday Nov. 14
Papadelias Sarah M
Igo Kaitlyn
Li Ran
Group 2: 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursday Nov. 14
Tamariz Gabriela
Ubwa Sese
Minchin Minch
Group 3: 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Friday Nov. 15
Kim Jihyun
Guo Liyang
Group 4: 9-11 a.m. Monday Nov. 18
Morehart Emma
Rin Woo
Welfel Andrew
Group 5: 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Monday Nov. 18
Mcintosh Hasani
Choi Moonhoon
Mullen Austin
On Writing
For all kinds of writing advice from grammar and punctuation to APA style, the Purdue OWL is a great site to bookmark and consult: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
On the Articles a/an/the
I have great admiration for international students who come to the U.S. to study in a language not their own. And I have been doing this long enough both as a teacher and an editor working with reporters in South Korea that I understand some of the problems people sometimes have with English. So, here are a couple of readings that might help with any problems you might have with the articles a / an / the:
Purdue OWL: How to Use Articles (a/an/the): http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/
More Help
The Three Most Common English Language Errors Made by Non-English Speakers: http://www.abacus-es.com/journal/learning-english/editing-english-for-publication-a-guide-for-educated-asian-language-speakers/
About News
Roundup of Selected News on News
10.15.13
Popular Science’s decision to ban comments sparked a debate about their value (New York Times)
A new report outlines emerging best practices for online comments (Poynter)
The World Association of Newspaper and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) produced a report on online comments based on a survey of 104 news organizations from 63 countries and made recommendations for publishers, such as hiring a community manager or encouraging journalists to join the discussion. Some surveyed say commenters are their most loyal readers.
“Academics: This survey asked editors; it would be interesting to get some harder data from actual comments” — Joshua Benton, director of Nieman Lab (@jbenton)
What’s the value of online comment sections? (KALW)
7 reasons why BuzzFeed is the death/savior of news (BBC)
Following news about BuzzFeed’s plans to launch French, Spanish and Portuguese editions, Rory Cellan-Jones takes a page out of BuzzFeed’s book and acquiesces to the news platform’s now global growth and its dominance of the way younger people hear about what’s happening around the world.
10.9.13
The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web | Katharine Viner http://gu.com/p/3jdxv/tw
10.7.13
But did you know: Maybe less time spent means young people are getting news more efficiently (BuzzMachine)
Jeff Jarvis questions the Pew Research Center’s forecast of a “perilous future for news.” Instead, Jarvis asks whether the survey’s results indicates that for young people news is simply more efficient. Time spent with one media source is important for ad rates, but doesn’t tell you how informed the public is overall. Instead of measuring time spent, “we should measure it by how much less time they need to spend with us to reach their own goals,” writes Jarvis.
+ Earlier: Why Breaking News is focused on “time saved” not “time spent” (Breaking News Blog)
+ Offshore: A look at UK children’s use of media and digital devices (Benedict Evans)
+ What people are saying: “Pew news consumption data are interesting, but I wonder whether definition of news consumption is too narrow” — Emily Bell, director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School (@emilybell) and “News & newsrooms needs to get better at chasing young people than expect them to ‘follow’ news” — Raju Narisetti, senior vice president, strategy at News Corp (@rajunarisetti)
In a leaked video, Egyptian army officers debate how to sway news media(New York Times)
In a six-minute clip of a private meeting led by General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi before the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, officers express their dismay at public scrutiny of the army, writes David Kirkpatrick. The conversation foreshadowed the broad media crackdown that been going on since the military takeover, including the shutdown of Islamist television networks and the main newspaper supporting Morsi, and the arrests of several journalists.
Much of the most viral news that sustains websites is actually too good to be true. Does that matter? (PaidContent)
Mathew Ingram takes a look at a story on Gawker about a heartwarming and uplifting letter from a grandfather to his daughter, in which he chastised her for disowning her own child, who had recently come out as gay. But the veracity of the letter has come into question. “Can you serve the needs of your readers for uplifting stories, and the financial needs of your advertising-driven (and therefore traffic-driven) media operation, while still poking holes in happy stories?” asks Ingram.
+ On point: Is viral bullshit our new classifieds? (Medium)
+ On the contrary: In defense of viral bullshit — sort of (John Kroll Digital)
1. Discussion Leaders Week by Week
Week 11
I have broken down presentations on readings into small bites.
I suggest you bring in handouts for your respective sections to distribute to class:
- Chapter 8: The Reinvention of Publicness – pp. 235-265 / Moonhoon Choi – Pages 235 to 249 / Kaitlyn – Pages 249-258 (on deliberative democracy) / Liyang Gao – Pages 258-265 (on Toward an Ethic of Global Responsibility)
- The Mass Media and Democracy: Between the Modern and the Postmodern by James Carey – Julie – Pages 1-8 / Austin – Pages 9-18 / Sese – 18-21 (Media Entering the Postmodern Era)
- Susan Crawford, “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,” hosted by Andrew Blum, Wired Magazine (Video 57:24) Minch / Emma
Week 10
- Read: Chapter 7: Self and Experience in a Mediated World – pp. 207-234 – Andrew
- Read: Misogyny and Twitter – confusing cause with medium by Aaron Peters Do you see how the concept of technological determinism has been used — in this case — to say a technology creates misogyny? Explain briefly the critique of technological determinism. Gabriela – gives us the gist of this essay – but also speak to the issue of technological determinism and cultural determinism
- Read: The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) by Langston Hughes – Hasani
Week 9
- Chapter 6: The Remooring of Tradition – pp. 179-206 – Sarah
- The Reflexivity of Modernity From: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity(Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press), 1990, 36-45. http://bit.ly/16DxaH8 – Ran Li
Week 8
- Chapter 5: The Globalization of Communication – pp. 149-178 – Minch
- The Reality Principle: The rise and rise of a television genre – Austin
Week 7
- Chapter 4: The Transformation of Visibility – pp. 119-148 – Sese
- Think about the complexity of mediated visibility and the word “synoptic” as you view: Rashomon (1:22:51) – All be ready to present on this
- Too much information: Our instincts for privacy evolved in tribal societies where walls didn’t exist. No wonder we are hopeless oversharers by Ian Leslie – Rin Woo
Week 6
- Chapter 3: The Rise of Mediated Interaction – pp. 81-118 – Julie Kim
- The Oral World vs. The Written Word by Nicholas Carr & “…an ostentation often mendacious, always superficial.” – Kaitlyn Igo
Week 5
- Chapter 2: The Media and the Development of Modern Societies – pp. 44-80 (An overview summary of chapter) – Emma
- On the mediation of everything: Sonia Livingstone’s ICA presidential address 2008 – Liyang Guo
Week 4
- Chapter 1: Communication and Social Context – pp. 10-31 – Gabriella
- Chapter 1: Communication and Social Context – pp. 31-43 – Andrew Welfel
- Semiotics for Beginners: Encoding/Decoding & Encoding, Decoding and the Construction of Meaning (video 4:36) –Moonhoon Choi
Week 3
- The New Visibility up to Page 41: Hasani
- Mediated Visibility as a Double-Edged Sword 41-51: Sarah
- Google Glass essay & video: Julie Kim
- Building a panopticon: The evolution of the NSA’s Xkeyscore: Ran Li
The Reflexivity of Modernity
Inherent in the idea of modernity is a contrast with tradition. As noted previously, many combinations of the modern and the traditional are to be found in concrete social settings. Indeed, some authors have argued that these are so tightly interlaced as to make any generalised comparison valueless. But such is surely not the case, as we can see by pursuing an enquiry into the relation between modernity and reflexivity.
There is a fundamental sense in which reflexivity is a defining characteristic of all human action. All human beings routinely “keep in touch” with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it. I have called this elsewhere the “reflexive monitoring of action,” using the phrase to draw attention to the chronic character of the processes involved.” Human action does not incorporate chains of aggregate interactions and reasons, but a consistent-and, as Erving Goffman above all has shown us, never-to-be-relaxed-monitoring of behaviour and its contexts. This is not the sense of reflexivity which is specifically connected with modernity, although it is the necessary basis of it.
In traditional cultures, the past is honoured and symbols are valued because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations. Tradition is a mode of integrating the reflexive monitoring of action with the time-space organisation of the community. It is a means of handling time and space, which inserts any particular activity or experience within the continuity of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices. Tradition is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it. Tradition does not so much resist change as pertain to a context in which there are few separated temporal and spatial markers in terms of which change can have any meaningful form.
In oral cultures, tradition is not known as such, even though these cultures are the most traditional of all. To understand tradition, as distinct from other modes of organising action and experience, demands cutting into time-space in ways which are only possible with the invention of writing. Writing expands the level of time-space distanciation and creates a perspective of past, present, and future in which the reflexive appropriation of knowledge can be set off from designated tradition. However, in pre-modern civilisations reflexivity is still largely limited to the reinterpretation and clarification of tradition, such that in the scales of time the side of the “past” is much more heavily weighed down than that of the “future.” Moreover, since literacy is the monopoly of the few, the routinisation of daily life remains bound up with tradition in the old sense.
With the advent of modernity, reflexivity takes on a different character. It is introduced into the very basis of system reproduction, such that thought and action are constantly refracted back upon one another. The routinisation of daily life has no intrinsic connections with the past at all, save in so far as what “was done before” happens to coincide with what can be defended in a principled way in the light of incoming knowledge. To sanction a practice because it is traditional will not do; tradition can be justified, but only in the light of knowledge which is not itself authenticated by tradition. Combined with the inertia of habit, this means that, even in the most modernised of modern societies, tradition continues to play a role. But this role is generally much less significant than is supposed by authors who focus attention upon the integration of tradition and modernity in the contemporary world. For justified tradition is tradition in sham clothing and receives its identity only from the reflexivity of the modern.
The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and re-formed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character. We should be clear about the nature of this phenomenon. All forms of social life are partly constituted by actors’ knowledge of them. Knowing “how to go on” in Wittgenstein‘s sense is intrinsic to the conventions which are drawn upon and reproduced by human activity. In all cultures, social practices are routinely altered in the light of ongoing discoveries which feed into them. But only in the era of modernity is the revision of convention radicalised to apply (in principle) to all aspects of human life, including technological intervention into the material world. It is often said that modernity is marked by an appetite for the new, but this is not perhaps completely accurate. What is characteristic of modernity is not an embracing of the new for its own sake, but the presumption of wholesale reflexivity – which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself.
Probably we are only now, in the late twentieth century, beginning to realise in a full sense how deeply unsettling this outlook is. For when the claims of reason re-placed those of tradition, they appeared to offer a sense of certitude greater than that provided by preexisting dogma. But this idea only appears persuasive so long as we do not see that the reflexivity of modernity actually subverts reason, at any rate where reason is understood as the gaining of certain knowledge. Modernity is constituted in and through reflexively applied knowledge, but the equation of knowledge with certitude has turned out to be misconceived. We are abroad in a world which is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time we can never be sure that any given element of that knowledge will not be revised.
Even philosophers who most staunchly defend the claims of science to certitude, such as Karl Popper, acknowledge that, as he expresses it, “all science rests upon shifting sand.” In science, nothing is certain, and nothing can be proved, even if scientific endeavour provides us with the most dependable information about the world to which we can aspire. In the heart of the world of hard science, modernity floats free.
No knowledge under conditions of modernity is knowledge in the “old” sense, where “to know” is to be certain. This applies equally to the natural and the social sciences. In the case of social science, however, there are further considerations involved. We should recall at this point the observations made earlier about the reflexive components of sociology.
In the social sciences, to the unsettled character of all empirically based knowledge we have to add the “sub-version” which comes from the reentry of social scientific discourse into the contexts it analyses. The reflection of which the social sciences are the formalised version (a specific genre of expert knowledge) is quite fundamental to the reflexivity of modernity as a whole.
Because of the close relation between the Enlightenment and advocacy of the claims of reason, natural science has usually been taken as the preeminent endeavour distinguishing the modern outlook from what went before. Even those who favour interpretative rather than naturalistic sociology have normally seen social science as the poor relation of the natural sciences, particularly given the scale of technological development consequent upon scientific discoveries. But the social sciences are actually more deeply implicated in modernity than is natural science, since the chronic revision of social practices in the light of knowledge about those practices is part of the very tissue of modern institutions.
All the social sciences participate in this reflexive relation, although sociology has an especially central place. Take as an example the discourse of economics. Concepts like “capital,” “investment,” “markets,” “industry,” and many others, in their modern senses, were elaborated as part of the early development of economics as a distinct discipline in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These concepts, and empirical conclusions linked to them, were formulated in order to analyse changes involved in the emergence of modern institutions. But they could not, and did not, remain separated from the activities and events to which they related. They have become integral to what “modern economic life” actually is and inseparable from it. Modern economic activity would not be as it is were it not for the fact that all members of the population have mastered these concepts and an indefinite variety of others.
The lay individual cannot necessarily provide formal definitions of terms like “capital” or “investment,” but everyone who, say, uses a savings account in a bank demonstrates an implicit and practical mastery of those notions. Concepts such as these, and the theories and empirical information linked to them, are not merely handy devices whereby agents are somehow more clearly able to understand their behaviour than they could do otherwise. They actively constitute what that behaviour is and inform the reasons for which it is undertaken. There cannot be a clear insulation between literature available to economists and that which is either read or filters through in other ways to interested parties in the population: business leaders, government officials, and members of the public. The economic environment is constantly being al-tered in the light of these inputs, thus creating a situation of continual mutual involvement between economic discourse and the activities to which it refers.
The pivotal position of sociology in the reflexivity of modernity comes from its role as the most generalised type of reflection upon modern social life. Let us consider an example at the “hard edge” of naturalistic sociology. The official statistics published by governments concerning, for instance, population, marriage and divorce, crime and delinquency, and so forth, seem to provide a means of studying social life with precision. To the pioneers of naturalistic sociology, such as Durkheim, these statistics represented hard data, in terms of which the relevant aspects of modern societies can be analysed more accurately than where such figures are lacking. Yet official statistics are not just analytical characteristics of social activity, but again enter constitutively into the social universe from which they are taken or counted up. From its inception, the collation of official statistics has been constitutive of state power and of many other modes of social organisation also. The co-ordinated administrative control achieved by modern governments is inseparable from the routine monitoring of “official data” in which all contemporary states engage.
The assembling of official statistics is itself a reflexive endeavour, permeated by the very findings of the social sciences that have utilised them. The practical work of coroners, for example, is the basis for the collection of suicide statistics. In the interpretation of causes/motives for death, however, coroners are guided by concepts and theories which purport to illuminate the nature of suicide. It would not be at all unusual to find a coroner who had read Durkheim.
Nor is the reflexivity of official statistics confined to the sphere of the state. Anyone in a Western country who embarks upon marriage today, for instance, knows that divorce rates are high (and may also, however imperfectly or partially, know a great deal more about the demography of marriage and the family). Knowledge of the high rate of divorce might affect the very decision to marry, as well as decisions about related considerations-provisions about property and so forth. Awareness of levels of divorce, moreover, is normally much more than just consciousness of a brute fact. It is theorised by the lay agent in ways pervaded by sociological thinking. Thus virtually everyone contemplating marriage has some idea of how family institutions have been changing, changes in the relative social position and power of men and women, alterations in sexual mores, etc. – all of which enter into processes of further change which they reflexively inform. Marriage and the family would not be what they are today were they not thoroughly “sociologised” and “psy-chologised.”
The discourse of sociology and the concepts, theories, and findings of the other social sciences continually “circulate in and out” of what it is that they are about. In so doing they reflexively restructure their subject matter, which itself has learned to think sociologically. Modernity is itself deeply and intrinsically sociological. Much that is problematic in the position of the professional sociologist, as the purveyor of expert knowledge about social life, derives from the fact that she or he is at most one step ahead of enlightened lay practitioners of the discipline.
Hence the thesis that more knowledge about social life (even if that knowledge is as well buttressed empirically as it could possibly be) equals greater control over our fate is false. It is (arguably) true about the physical world, but not about the universe of social events. Expanding our understanding of the social world might produce a progressively more illuminating grasp of human institutions and, hence, increasing “technological” control over them, if it were the case either that social life were entirely separate from human knowledge about it or that knowledge could be filtered continuously into the reasons for social action, producing step-by-step increases in the “rationality” of behaviour in relation to specific needs.
Both conditions do in fact apply to many circumstances and contexts of social activity. But each falls well short of that totalising impact which the inheritance of Enlightenment thought holds out as a goal. This is so because of the influence of four sets of factors.
One – factually very important but logically the least interesting, or at any rate the least difficult to handle analytically – is differential power. The appropriation of knowledge does not happen in a homogeneous fashion, but is often differentially available to those in power positions, who are able to place it in the service of sectional interests.
A second influence concerns the role of values. Changes in value orders are not independent of innovations in cognitive orientation created by shifting perspectives on the social world. If new knowledge could be brought to bear upon a transcendental rational basis of values, this situation would not apply. But there is no such rational basis of values, and shifts in outlook deriving from inputs of knowledge have a mobile relation to changes in value orientations.
The third factor is the impact of unintended consequences. No amount of accumulated knowledge about social life could encompass all circumstances of its implementation, even if such knowledge were wholly distinct from the environment to which it applied. If our knowledge about the social world simply got better and better, the scope of unintended consequences might become more and more confined and unwanted consequences rare. However, the reflexivity of modern social life blocks off this possibility and is itself the fourth influence involved. Although least discussed in relation to the limits of Enlightenment reason, it is certainly as significant as any of the others. The point is not that there is no stable social world to know, but that knowledge of that world contributes to its unstable or mutable character.
The reflexivity of modernity, which is directly involved with the continual generating of systematic self-knowledge, does not stabilise the relation between expert knowledge and knowledge applied in lay actions. Knowledge claimed by expert observers (in some part, and in many varying ways) rejoins its subject matter, thus (in principle, but also normally in practice) altering it. There is no parallel to this process in the natural sciences; it is not at all the same as where, in the field of microphysics, the intervention of an observer changes what is being studied.
From: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press), 1990, 36-45. http://bit.ly/16DxaH8
“…an ostentation often mendacious, always superficial.”
From W. J. Stillman, “Journalism and Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1891. http://bit.ly/13sV6L2
This is a literary type writing about the effect of newspapers on life and culture more than a hundred years ago. It is not all that different from Socrates’s complaint about writing in the fourth century BC. In the 21st century do you see some similarity to complaints about social media/smart phones etc. on life and culture?
“America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing, and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence. In this chase of the day’s accidents we still keep the lead, as in the consequent neglect and oversight of what is permanent and therefore vital in its importance to intellectual character. The effect is disastrous, and affects the whole / range of our mental activities; we develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives; our traveling is a competition to see the most in the least time, our learning the collection of the greatest number of facts concerning the greatest number of things, and our pride the multitude of subjects we know something about rather than the soundness and depth of the knowledge we possess of a few. We desire to be glib; we mistake glitter for luminousness; we force the note in whatever we undertake, for nothing is so repugnant to our standards as the calm of a serene philosophy. The most disastrous consequence of this condition of things is that even those of us who are earnest are driven into materialism in some of its shapes, if we would make an impression on contemporary development, and our lives are little by little deprived of the spiritual leaven that makes their true vitality. We are more proud of this electric-light brilliancy than we are of any of our real virtues, and strain to be sparkling until we but dimly perceive the difference between being funny and witty, more dimly that between being witty and wise. To sum up all that could be said on this score, we are more anxious to seem than to be. Our art, our literature, our politics, and our social organization are infected with the passion of an ostentation often mendacious, always superficial.”[1]
[1] W. J. Stillman, “Journalism and Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1891, 689-690.
Twitter Hate
Twitter under fire after bank note campaigner is target of rape threats
Jane Austen to become the new face of the £10 note was subjected … Fellow MP Stella Creasy tweeted: “Don’t tell us 2 ignore rape threats, …
Twitter Rape Row: Abuse At £10 Note Campaigner
Police investigate Twitter rape threats against the woman who successfully campaigned for Jane Austen to appear on £10 notes.
After the Jane Austen announcement I suffered rape threats for 48 hours, but I’m still confident the trolls won’t win
Is this the sort of thing that is allowed to happen when corporations run the media? This is a very old question.
It is very doubtful whether corporations should be allowed to run newspapers. As the old saying is, “A corporation has neither a soul to be saved nor a body to be damned.” Corporations have no conscience or scruples. Newspapers should be published only by individuals. The real proprietor should not be allowed to hide behind a corporation of his own making.[i]
– New York Mayor William J. Gaynor (1911) who had had a long-running feud with the sensationalist press over criticism of his administration and – he alleged – an assassination attempt on his life prompted by press coverage of him.
[i] “Gaynor’s Newspaper. New York’s Mayor Gives His Ideas on How It Should be Conducted. Declares that a Small Home Circulation is Worth a Million in the Gutter – Dwells on the Importance of Truth in All Departments and Advocates Brevity and Simplicity of Statement,” Editor & Publisher, December 2, 1911, 1, 10.
Media & Critiques of Capitalism & Consumerism & the Commodification of Journalism to the Detriment of Democracy
Commercial Masters of Our Voice: http://www.opendemocracy.net/tony-curzon-price/commercial-masters-of-our-voice Once upon a time publishers sold content to readers, and readers to advertisers. This two-fold market is being destroyed by the same technology that enables writers and readers to engage with each other in ever more sophisticated ways. But, argues Tony Curzon Price, audiences that recognise their collective economic power could handsomely fund the media they want.
The Production of Meaning (2006) http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/video/Adbusters_The-Production-of_Meaning_2006.avi ”Here is the challenge of media democracy: to change the way information flows, the way we interact with the mass media, the way meaning is produced in our society. This DVD – a collection of television spots and video clips produced over the years by regular culture jammers – is proof that anyone can seize the media reins and begin producing real meaning.” A compilation video from Adbusters contributors. Presented as montage.
Historical Summary of Effects
Powerful Effects — 1920s to 1940s
- Researchers believed that the media (movies and radio) had very immediate and direct impacts on its audience.
- Harold Lasswell studied World War II propaganda and concluded that the media could be used to change behavior: convince soldiers of their duty, get housewives to change food habits, improve morale of new recruits.
- Assumes that the audience is passive and uncritical. Based more on anectodal evidence than on empirical research.
- Sometimes called the hypodermic needle or bullet theory.
Minimalist Effects Theory — 1940s to 1960s (approx.)
- People appear to be far more influenced by friends and acquaintances than by the media. Paul Lazarsfeld conducted two massive studies of voter behavior and opinion during an election, concluding that the media had very little direct effect on voters choices.
- Audiences are stubborn and insulate themselves against contradictory messages.
- Maxwell McCombs and Don Shaw developed a theory of agenda-setting, explaining that the media do not tell people what to think, but what to think about.
- Narcotizing dysfunction — Some researchers believe that the media causes people to withdraw and become passive.
Cumulative Effects Theory — 1960s to present
- The media can have both powerful and limited effects on an audience, depending on situational factors.
- Mass media is a socializing influence that impacts the development of attitudes, beliefs and values.
- Mass media is more influential during periods of unrest, when people are uncertain.
- Mass media is more influential on some personalities than on others.
- Spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1984) — People make judgments about which side is ahead and gaining support on controversial issues. The “losing side” stops voicing opinions, starting a spiral of silence, which ultimately affects change of opinion and behavior.
Uses and Gratifications Studies
- Explores why people use the media: for surveillance, for socialization, for diversion.
- Consistency theory says that people tend to watch and read what they agree with.
Donica Mensing – University of Nevada, Reno
MMC 6660 Mass Comm & Society 