Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 23

COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

Traditional mass media:
Vertical (top-down)
civic communities

Social media:
Horizontal social
communities

Media audiences such
as voters or service
members:
Personal history and
preferences
Figure 3. Agendamelding during Election Campaigns and
Other Decision-Making Events
relied heavily on social media or the opinions of other
people they knew and valued to make decisions about
whom they would vote for. That is, people melded
agendas from vertical and horizontal media as well
as from their own experiences and those of others, as
indicated in figure 3.12
As figure 3 shows, there are three general sources
of information about social and working communities.
Information comes from traditional media, from social
interactions with other people and social media, and
from personal experiences. In other words, the sum of
these three agendas constitutes 100 percent of people’s
information sources.

Example of Agendamelding in
Evolution of Voting Patterns
While measuring the personal experience of voters
is difficult, agenda-setting studies have shown that the
correlational value of traditional, vertical media agendas
can be measured somewhat accurately for voters and
media. This article proposes a useful formula to follow
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2015

this process, which is similar among people in a military
organization, a commercial company, or a nation.
For the purposes of this formula, together the
total value of all important issues is 1.00. Knowing
the correlational value of the vertical media, users can
estimate what people learn from horizontal media
or personal experience, using this agenda community
attraction (ACA) formula.13
ACA =1 – [(Vertical media correlation)2
+ (1- Vertical media correlation)2]
The formula argues that an audience’s picture of the
changing workplace, or even the world at large—irrespective of the recent and dramatic impact of social media into society—still begins with vertical media. Next,
what people do not learn from vertical sources, they
learn from horizontal media and from other people.
For example, if a person sees a candidate’s television advertisement in vertical media, and then sees a
friend’s post on Facebook, that individual may evaluate
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