Agenda setting and the spiral of silence

What we’ve explored so far are the potential effects of communication and media on individuals – both the real manifestations of such effects and the ways in which society imagines, projects, and worries about them.

But you’ll also notice that such investigations throw up interesting questions about the effects of communication on society itself.

For example, we might describe polarisation as an effect of communication, especially digital and networked modes of communication. Polarisation involves the division of audiences or publics into two sharply contrasting groups that are mistrustful of each other. In a polarised society, we might be less inclined to listen to others whose ideas don’t confirm our own worldviews. Arguably, the rise of social media has deeply contributed to the polarisation of societies in the 21st century.

Image by Iván Tamás from Pixabay. Polarisation can be described as an effect of communication on society.

Communicators can also have an effect on society if they strategically and deliberately put an issue “on the agenda”, or “set the agenda” for public conversation. By focusing on some issues rather than others, communicators influence what is considered important – and what, or who, is silenced. According to the communication theorists McCombs and Shaw (1972), this is agenda setting.

Try this. Make a list of five issues that you think are most important, globally, at the moment. Now look at your list and ask yourself: where did I get these ideas from? Where and how did I come to believe that these issues are of global importance, at the expense of others?

It’s likely that there are many answers to those questions. You may consider issues that have impacted you personally, or impacted your home country, to be more significant than issues from which you are distanced. But it may also be that you think of these issues as important because you often read about them in the news, see them represented in film or television, hear them discussed in podcasts, or see them depicted online. The latter is an example of agenda setting.

This also means that communication leads to the creation and cultivation of silences.

An interesting variation on this idea is the spiral of silence, a theory conceptualised in the 1970s by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who is described by British newspaper The Independent as a “pioneer of public opinion research”. According to Noelle-Neumann, we’re more likely to speak out if we feel our opinion is supported by others. For this reason, the seeming dominance of an opinion leads to the creation of silences because dissenters are less likely to voice their perspectives. Noelle-Neumann named this communicational phenomenon “the spiral of silence”.

Consider how this manifests as both an operation and an effect of mediated communication in a digital world. Noelle-Neumann was wonderfully prescient. Silence can grow if topics and perspectives are not represented, and such silence spirals into more silence. As Tsfati et al explain:

In other words, the media seemingly tell us what other people think and this influences our own likelihood or willingness to speak out about certain topics, share certain opinions, or engage in public conversations. Even though much has changed since Noelle-Neumann developed the spiral of silence theory – at the core of which was a broadcast model of communication and a perception of the media as “mass” rather than fragmented – we can detect manifestations of her ideas today. Tsfati et al, for example, found that audiences exposed to right-wing media tended to believe that public opinion was “tilted toward” the right (2014); this is, of course, another way of describing how societies come to be polarised.

Some of the best work I’ve seen by Master of Communication students takes silence as its starting point. For the communication researcher, silences are deeply interesting. We need to ask: what are the things nobody is talking about, and why is this the case?