Rethinking Public Agenda in a Time of High-Choice Media Environment

Abstract

Contemporary political communication is conditioned by an information environment characterised, on the one hand, by increased choice, and on the other by the fragmentation and multiplication of the ways of consuming information. This article introduces the notion of the ‘interrelated public agenda’ as a frame to study this context, taking into account elements of convergence and divergence from a single viewpoint, adopting a complex analysis model which proceeds along axes which make it possible to detect a continuum in which opposing forces are in a constant, problematic equilibrium. In this sense, we identified three dimensions which are helpful in describing public agenda interrelations. First, <em>horizontality vs verticality</em>, which contains the dynamics of power, and is generated in a context of political disintermediation, through the altered nature of the media system—in the complex relation between legacy media and web 2.0, and between social, institutional actors, and others. Second, <em>personal vs aggregative</em>, which stresses the need to take account of convergences and divergences between personal orientation towards certain issues and the aggregative pressure in different media spaces in which people feel at home: from information consumption via media diets of varying complexity to active participation in the production of content or in public discourse, offline and online. And finally, <em>dynamic vs static</em>, which points to the need to orient analysis towards the relation between media spaces rather than focusing on specific spaces, thus helping, importantly, to make up for the current dearth of research in comparison with studies of single platforms.

Communication and Social Sustainability: Information Disorder and the Risk of Pollution in the Italian Hybrid Media Ecosystem

“…The first sub-area contains a list of 20 news items, 6 true and 14 false. The selection of the 20 news items was made by choosing agenda topics [35] within the Italian hybrid information system that have become relevant in Italian public opinion [36]. A higher number of fake news items than true news items was deliberately chosen to avoid response set effects.…”

An Interweaving of Influences: How the Digital Environment Redefines Journalism

“…The increasingly evident organization of the journalistic field in several intersecting social worlds explains the emphasis of many authors on the sectoralization, fragmentation and consequent dispersion and disturbance of the public sphere; it is no coincidence that it is often used in plural-the public spheres (Dahlgren 2005;Prior 2007;Benett and Pfetsch 2018;. More appropriately, in our opinion, we should speak of an interrelated public sphere, defined by an agenda resulting from numerous textual and reading plans, which includes both the individual and the aggregate dimension, which constitutes the current expression of information convergence in contemporary society (Bentivegna and Boccia Artieri 2020).…”

Prediction of the Infectious Outbreak COVID-19 and Prevalence of Anxiety: Global Evidence

“…Furthermore, the increased usage of social media data allows for the monitoring of people's health communication behavior in real-time and at no cost. For the sake of this specific context, social media platforms like Twitter are particularly pertinent, since they exhibit patterns of communication, such as using hashtags to showcase individual-generated information [49].…”