Agenda setting describes a very powerful influence of the media: the ability to tell us what issues are important. Everything that is on the media is assumed to be relevant.
Already in 1922, journalist Lippman was concerned that the media had the power to present images to the public. He claimed that media act as mediators between “the world outside and the pictures in our head”.
McCombs and Shaw investigated presidential campaigns in 1968, 1972 and 1976. They discovered that “mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda” and that “we judge as important what the media judge as important”.
Who is most likely to be affected by the agenda-setting function of the media? McCombs and Shaw have argued that the people who have a willingness to let the media shape their thinking have a high need for orientation.
Trending Topic: is a term coined by Twitter to refer to the most used keywords on the social network during a given period of time. It is a concept related to fashion trends and topics, what everyone is talking about at any given time.
Watercooler Effect: describes a very powerful influence of the media: the ability to tell us what issues are important. Everything that is on the media is assumed to be relevant.
Today, however, this theory is turned on its head – but not quite in the way you might think. Let’s look at Facebook. Clinically speaking, Facebook is a free social networking: when passively seeking content on Facebook, people (probably you) will scroll through their (or your) news feed. Facebook deploys complex, proprietary algorithms that select what will appear in each user’s news feed. To do this, the news feed ranking team at Facebook devises a system capable of assigning any given Facebook post a “relevancy score” specific to any given Facebook user.
