No abstract

The revelation of the surveillance practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) serves as a compelling case study of the new agenda-setting capacities in the 21st century. We use a stream of 14 million messages on Twitter to note how its reach equals that of television. Next, we demonstrate the interactive communication characteristics of social media in the use of hashtags, retweets, and shared URLs. Finally, we draw upon data from Lexis-Nexis on newspaper stories and broadcast transcripts to emphasize the different ways social and mainstream media constructed the story about surveillance and interacted with each other. We conclude agenda setting can no longer be understood as a monopoly of the mainstream media, indexed to the actions of political elites. Social media, through its reach, interaction, and broadening of ideas brought into the discussion, emerge as a distinctive mode of large-scale communication. Giving voice to the people introduces an entirely new dimension to agenda setting.

A critical review of academic work on negativity in political advertising shows that the concept has been defined in ways that are too broad, insufficiently holistic, and too pejorative. Data from the American National Election Study demonstrate the disproportionate use of "negative" to describe campaign ads by voters. Exploratory data suggest the component parts of negativity: misleading claims, emotional appeals, one-sided attacks, and a generally loathsome view of politicians. To better understand academic interest in the subject, it is necessary to explore the shared assumptions of the political reform movement of the past century and of reformminded researchers-specifically their disdain for the emotional underpinnings of political behavior, even as emotion is linked with higher citizen engagement with politics. It is possible to pursue a better informed and less benighted discourse on campaign advertising by eschewing the global conception of negativity by more seriously engaging the theoretical bases of representative government.

A critical review of academic work on negativity in political advertising shows that the concept has been defined in ways that are too broad, insufficiently holistic, and too pejorative. Data from the American National Election Study demonstrate the disproportionate use of "negative" to describe campaign ads by voters. Exploratory data suggest the component parts of negativity: misleading claims, emotional appeals, one-sided attacks, and a generally loathsome view of politicians. To better understand academic interest in the subject, it is necessary to explore the shared assumptions of the political reform movement of the past century and of reformminded researchers-specifically their disdain for the emotional underpinnings of political behavior, even as emotion is linked with higher citizen engagement with politics. It is possible to pursue a better informed and less benighted discourse on campaign advertising by eschewing the global conception of negativity by more seriously engaging the theoretical bases of representative government.

Analysis of the audiences for the state of the union addresses on Twitter from 2010-2012 provides analytical leverage in unpacking the concept of audience, which has largely inhabited an analytical “black box,” seen as of critical importance but little understood. The authors frame audience as “co-motion” as it evolves from a broadcast medium to a medium of interaction in three moves: hashtags that establish a space for gathering, retweets that share reading, and sharing of urls that serve to communicate importance, evaluative judgment, and justification. They contrast the response of the congressional audience and the Twitter audience and find, while there was substantial overlap in their applause, members of Congress were less responsive than the Twitter audience to the president's calls for them to meet their responsibilities and less responsive to criticisms of major corporations. The authors find a vibrant political discourse on Twitter reaching a potential audience that rivals in size that of television, as audience becomes the public domain.