Connecting data: agenda-setting through connection

Abstract

Traditional media, like the television, the radio, and the newspaper, are not the only ubiquitous media anymore. Social media have attracted a significant amount of users. Media events have started to evolve under social media influence. While traditional and social media differ, they both seem to have an agenda-setting function. The agenda-setting theory is, however, adjusted to researching media events in relation to traditional media only. This thesis transforms the agenda-setting theory to be useful in a new context with social media. The focus will be on the theory’s core concept, transfer of salience, by identifying the way social media can participate in the agenda-setting process. Yet, as social media are not created to serve their users, but the companies behind them, their design may harm a potential participation. Through a hermeneutic approach, I investigate the agenda-setting theory and the design of social media to achieve a level of understanding sufficient for the transformation of the agenda-setting theory in relation to social media. Focus will be on the theory’s core concept “transfer of salience”. This way, the theory may help us understand social media impact from an established perspective in the communication sciences.

It appears that social media are able to exhibit salience through a strategy which I suggest to characterize as “amplification through connection”. By connecting messages, users, and other types of content – in short “data” – they are clustered into a meaningful whole. This way, data are amplified and they become salient in the wide plethora of messages on social media. While users are steered through social media’s commercial centered algorithms, users are not fully constrained; and can, to some extent, reject to go with the flow. Furthermore, social media can bypass the traditional media and directly set the public and policy agendas. They also can force traditional media to reconsider salience of an issue and “use” traditional media as an intermediary to set other agendas.