The Abacus, 8-Track Tapes….and Agenda Setting?

The abacus, the slide rule, 8-track tapes, Betamax… and agenda setting?  The four technologies listed above died out when newer technologies that could perform their tasks better and more efficiently were developed. As I noted in an earlier blog,  some scholars have similarly argued that new technologies may make agenda setting irrelevant. You no longer do see a unified media agenda. Also, the Internet has made it easier for people to bypass the media altogether in searching for information.  However, the death of agenda setting may be greatly exaggerated.  The theory needs to simply adapt to the new media environment.

The Internet has certainly challenged some of the basic assumptions of agenda setting.  The theory presumed that the media, formerly largely limited to major newspapers and the networks, shared a similar agenda because their journalists shared similar values.  But the emergence of cable news, alternative news and information sites, blogs and social networks has thrown that assumption into question. A basic assumption of the theory is that those who do not experience an event first hand or through talking with others would need to rely on the media to tell them what issues are important.  But what if people could bypass the media and seek out information on their own or have only certain types of information sent to them? Aren’t people now setting their own agenda?

The Project for Excellence in Journalism recently studied how the legacy press agenda compares to blogs, Twitter and YouTube   The results show mixed support, at best, for agenda setting.  While more than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy sources such as newspapers and broadcast networks (with 80% coming from the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post), blogs and traditional media agreed on the lead story in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. PEJ did find, however, that mainstream media influenced the blog agenda more than vice versa. Twitter users were even less influenced by the legacy media.  Half of the sources used in tweets came from the traditional media and 40 percent relied on web-only news sources such as Mashable and CNET.  Not surprisingly, Twitter and legacy media had divergent agendas, with the two sources agreeing on the lead in just four of the 29 weeks studied.

When PEJ compared topics stressed in the mainstream press and blogs and Twitter, politics was the most important topic for both blogs and traditional media.  However, blog and traditional media agendas split after that.  Blogs focused on foreign events, science and technology, while legacy media centered on health and medicine, the economy and foreign news. On Twitter, however, users linked to technology stories far more than anything else (43 percent). Technology accounted for 1% of the newshole in the mainstream press.

The fact that agenda setting remains a commonly used theory and continues to evolve during the age of the Internet demonstrates that news of the theory’s demise was greatly exaggerated.  However, to continue to remain relevant, I believe the theory needs to better adapt to the new media landscape.  Before the Internet, it made sense to talk about the media agenda.  Most people got news through newspapers and television and there was considerable evidence that these sources shared similar values. But as the Internet has equaled newspapers as a source of information and people are getting information from a host of sources  other than the traditional media such as news and political websites, blogs, Twitter and other social network sites, the media now represents a whole host of information sources. Similarly, with the emergence of partisan and/or single issue websites and blogs and information increasingly produced by citizens rather than traditional journalists, you can  no longer speak of a single media agenda, but a host of agendas.  Furthermore, in the Web 2.0 media environment, users have more information to choose from as well as more control over what sources they will search out.  More importantly, the public is no longer a mere consumer of news.  Increasingly citizens have a greater role in producing news, from commenting on news stories or blog entries, to submitting photos and information to iReports and other similar services, to creating their own blogs.  Recently, individuals have assumed a third role of being conduits of news: posting story links to their Facebook page, Twitter page, or simply passing on stories and links through e-mail and receiving news and information from friends in return.

Certainly some researchers are already adapting to the new media environment.  Recent years have seen a growth in intermedia agenda setting.  For instance Sweetser, Golan and Wanta examined the intermedia agenda setting relationship between blogs, television news and political advertising and Messner and Distaso studied the blog and traditional media source cycle.  However, more work needs to center on the new media themselves, for instance examining how left-leaning and right-leaning blogs influence their readers’ agendas and the agendas of government officials or how the messages of conservative talk show hosts influence what both the public and Republican legislators view as important.

As the public has moved from mere consumers of information to producers and conduits, more efforts need to center on the role of the public in the agenda-setting process. This isn’t a new idea in agenda setting.  As Max McCombs noted, during the “second stage” of agenda setting research in the the 70s and 80s, researchers went beyond how the media influenced the public agenda to explore what factors led the public to seek out some messages more than others, with the focus on need for orientation. Active audience theories such as uses and gratifications and selective exposure as well as variables such as issue importance and partisanship may better help explain the role of the public in actively searching out content to achieve certain goals .

Also with the public playing a larger role in the production and distribution of news and information and public officials increasingly being able to sidestep the traditional media in advancing their own agenda, more attention needs to be paid to agenda building, which examines how the media, public official and public agenda influence and, in turn, are influenced by, each other.

David Perlmutter and I are co-editing a special issue of Mass Communication & Society looking at the role of social media in the 2008 campaign. One of the articles, by Matthew Ragas and Spiro Kiousis, Intermedia agenda-setting and political activism: MoveOn.org and the 2008 presidential election, provides a nice glimpse at what could be the future agenda setting.  Their study tested for intermedia agenda setting  among partisan news media coverage, political activist groups, citizen activists and official campaign advertising.  Specifically, the setting of the study was MoveOn.org “Obama in 30 seconds” ad contest in which the progressive political activist organization encouraged citizens to create ads to support then-candidate Barack Obama.  The contest provided a means to evaluate first- and second-level intermedia agenda setting relationships between  the explicitly progressive news outlet The Nation, official Obama and MoveOn.org campaign ads and the “Obama in 30 seconds” ads created by politically active citizens.  I will save the results for the Fall 2010 Mass Communication & Society Facebook Election issue.

I would like to hear what you think.  Has the Internet rendered agenda setting obsolete or does it remain a vibrant theory in the 21^st century?  To what degree, if any, should agenda setting be adapted to the Web. 2.0 world? And who still has an abacus, slide rule or an 8-track player?