Opinion Climates in Social Media: Blending Mass and Interpersonal Communication

Abstract

Social media's capacity for users to generate, comment on, and forward content (including mass media messages) to other users has created new forms of mass interpersonal communication. These systems render observable processes underlying the formation of opinion climates. Five attributes of contemporary electronic opinion environments can alter the way users gauge, form, and express opinions on topics of public interest: the juxtaposition of mass media and user‐generated content, ideological homogeneity and heterogeneity of online networks, technical ease with which to express opinions, the reach of messages, and networked audiences. These attributes facilitate analysis of theoretical and empirical works from different scholarly traditions, suggesting lines of inquiry that can enrich the analysis of (public) opinion formation via current communication technologies.

Revising the Communication Mediation Model for a New Political Communication Ecology

“…Active information seeking, selective exposure, and social sharing—all factors that influence engagement—have replaced simple reception within a limited choice set (Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, & Valenzuela, ). Audience members now create and send messages to one another, solidifying relatively homogeneous social networks (see Neubaum & Krämer, 2017, for review).…”

The Influence of Political Messages on User Engagement within Social Media Environments

“…Media organizations such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Al Jazeera Media Network, National Public Radio, and many more monitor usage algorithms and develop content based on this activity (Wells et al, 2016). As a result, social media users are provided the means to develop and send messages across social networks perpetuating online communities (Neubaum & Krämer, 2017). Bhattacharya (2016) has suggested that efforts to categorized negative campaign communications strategies into identifiable topics may be ill-considered.…”

Vectors into the Future of Mass and Interpersonal Communication Research: Big Data, Social Media, and Computational Social Science

“…Another line of research that raises questions about the importance of dense interpersonal connections for social influence is the research on political movements and political activism under the name of slacktivists versus activists (González‐Bailón & Wang, ; see also Neubaum & Krämer, ). The implicit assumption in network studies has been that social influence advances when interpersonal connectivity is high.…”