Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 22

to media differently. Older officers and enlisted service
members grew up in an environment still dominated by
traditional media. Younger officers and enlisted service
members have been socialized in a world of more personal social media.

Social Media and “Democratization”
of the News
Everyone is a consumer of information. But today, due
to social media, everyone is also a potential news journalist
and information creator. For example, a web-based platform called Newzulu allows its more than one hundred
thousand “citizen-journalists” to syndicate and share their
videos, photos, and packages with over seven thousand news outlets around the world.8 Videos posted on
Newzulu often attract the interest of, and then appear in,
traditional, vertical news media—especially footage from
places where professional journalists have little access.
Recognizing the public relations value of such
expanded access by popular social media, the White
House, which historically has preferred formal and
traditional top-down media like television and newspapers, is diversifying its media access by selectively
allowing social media organizations, such as BuzzFeed
and the Daily Beast, into its press briefing room.9
BuzzFeed? The Daily Beast? Who would have predicted such a development in media just ten years ago?
Notwithstanding, as the rise of social media and
decline in traditional media show, the ongoing dominant
status of a medium is unpredictable; all media rise … and
fall.10 But in whatever form, social media are here now
and wield great social influence, and more are coming.

Agendamelding
Irrespective of the type of media, media audiences
are not passive. Like vertical media, social media also
set agendas for those who use them. Facebook, Twitter,
and other social media platforms convey a set of broad
issues with details that frame what social media users
then collectively think about.
From this point of view, an expanded revision of the
agenda-setting concept that takes into consideration
social media helps explain the relationship between
modern day news media and society as a whole.
This expanded concept can also clarify the relationship the leadership of such institutions as the U.S.
Army or General Motors now have with media that
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communicate messages through official, unofficial,
and social media channels to their soldiers, employees, affiliated supporters, and others. What makes the
agenda-setting process different today is that all these
audiences now have instant access to a profusion of
other media as well as the opinions of other people
collected on a single handheld device. For many this
is their most important source of information and
opinion, with a significant impact on shaping their
attitudes and values.
As discussed earlier, a high correlation between the
media and the audience generally indicates their agreement on the importance of the topics mentioned in
traditional news reports. However, if there is not such
a high correlational agreement, it is highly probable
that audiences are turning to social media and personal
witness from other people to fill out missing information or assumptions to frame their worldview. Thus,
some audiences now use what the authors of this article
have labeled agendamelding—the modern day process
of expanding the selection of topics and issues from a
variety of media and combining them to individually
tailor a personally framed world view.
One consequence observed is that the less the agreement between official, traditional media messages and
alternate sources of information on topics and issues,
the more attention audiences will give to searching other kinds of media as a check on information from traditional sources. Additionally, audiences draw on their
own experiences to fill in the gaps between traditional
and social media information. Thus, audiences now increasingly use a combination of vertical and horizontal
media news, opinions expressed by individuals (much
of which is derived from social media), and personal
experiences to create a personally tailored picture of
the political, social, and working worlds in which they
function. Figure 3 illustrates this process.
How do audiences meld these vertical and horizontal media agendas? It sometimes may be a relatively subconscious cognitive process that results from
the plethora of media to which individuals are now
exposed. Two of the main author’s recent studies of
elections suggest that communications in vertical and
horizontal media platforms influence agendas for their
users, but in different ways and to different degrees.11
Audiences in this example, voters, used traditional
media as a major source of information, but they also
November-December 2015  MILITARY REVIEW