Opinion Climates in Social Media: Blending Mass and Interpersonal Communication

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.

[1]  Nicholas A. John,et al.  “I Don't like You Any More”: Facebook Unfriending by Israelis during the Israel–Gaza Conflict of 2014 , 2015 .

[2]  Nicole C. Krämer,et al.  What Do We Fear? Expected Sanctions for Expressing Minority Opinions in Offline and Online Communication , 2018, Commun. Res..

[3]  Dhavan V. Shah,et al.  Revising the Communication Mediation Model for a New Political Communication Ecology , 2017 .

[4]  Malcolm R. Parks.  Embracing the Challenges and Opportunities of Mixed-Media Relationships , 2017 .

[5]  Carl I. Hovland,et al.  Personality and Persuasibility. , 1960 .

[6]  William B. Gudykunst,et al.  Communication in everyday interpersonal and intergroup encounters , 1996 .

[7]  Chanthika Pornpitakpan.  The Persuasiveness of Source Credibility: A Critical Review of Five Decades' Evidence , 2004 .

[8]  D. Shaw,et al.  Agenda setting function of mass media , 1972 .

[9]  Stephan Winter,et al.  They Came, They Liked, They Commented: Social Influence on Facebook News Channels , 2015, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[10]  Bernad Batinic,et al.  A Personality‐Competence Model of Opinion Leadership , 2012 .

[11]  Joseph N Cappella,et al.  Vectors into the Future of Mass and Interpersonal Communication Research: Big Data, Social Media, and Computational Social Science. , 2017, Human communication research.

[12]  Joseph B. Walther,et al.  Communication Processes in Participatory Websites , 2012, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[13]  N. Krämer,et al.  Monitoring the Opinion of the Crowd: Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Public Opinion Perceptions on Social Media , 2017 .

[14]  D. Boyd,et al.  Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction , 2012 .

[15]  M. M. Ferree,et al.  Zeitgeist as an Empirical Phenomenon@@@The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion--Our Social Skin. , 1985 .

[16]  German Neubaum,et al.  Examining Characteristics of Opinion Leaders in Social Media: A Motivational Approach , 2016 .

[17]  Andrew F. Hayes,et al.  Exploring the Forms of Self‐Censorship: On the Spiral of Silence and the Use of Opinion Expression Avoidance Strategies , 2007 .

[18]  Peter H. Reingen,et al.  Social Ties and Word-of-Mouth Referral Behavior , 1987 .

[19]  Cass R. Sunstein,et al.  Neither Hayek nor Habermas , 2007 .

[20]  Albert C. Gunther,et al.  The Persuasive Press Inference , 1998 .

[21]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  6. Katz, E. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications , 1956 .

[22]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook , 2015, Science.

[23]  Eun-Ju Lee,et al.  What Do Others’ Reactions to News on Internet Portal Sites Tell Us? Effects of Presentation Format and Readers’ Need for Cognition on Reality Perception , 2010, Commun. Res..

[24]  Eli Pariser,et al.  The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You , 2011 .

[25]  Jochen Peter,et al.  Our Long ‘Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media’— A Cross-National Comparative Investigation of the Effects of Consonant Media Coverage , 2004 .

[26]  D. O’Keefe.  Persuasion , 1990, The Handbook of Communication Skills.

[27]  Henrik Serup Christensen.  Political activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or political participation by other means? , 2011, First Monday.

[28]  H. G. D. Zúñiga,et al.  Social Media, Political Expression, and Political Participation: Panel Analysis of Lagged and Concurrent Relationships , 2014 .

[29]  Edson C. Tandoc,et al.  When News Meets the Audience: How Audience Feedback Online Affects News Production and Consumption , 2017 .

[30]  Hernando Rojas.  “Corrective” Actions in the Public Sphere: How Perceptions of Media and Media Effects Shape Political Behaviors , 2010 .