Friday, May 30, 2025

Social Media

Over time, with the introduction of the online landscape, the dynamics of public opinion formation and communication strategies have immensely transformed. This transformation is due to many different things, but primarily from changes in the accessibility of information, the speed at which we obtain this information, and how easy it is to share your opinion with a widespread audience and interact with others. For one, the online landscape has greatly transformed our accessibility to information. With just a quick sentence in the Google search engine, you can access countless amounts of related information. With this, once someone has formed an opinion, there are numerous platforms that people can share their thoughts on. Furthermore, features on social media like hashtags, retweets, and reposts allow for this information to be spread very rapidly. 


Due to this transformation, the rapid spread of information or dialogue between people can contribute to misinformation. Most of the tweets or posts that go "viral" on social media have triggered an emotional response which gets people very invested and makes them feel a need for a rapid response. Because of this, people don't take time to use logic when expressing their opinions and rather appeal to emotion which is a very effective tool in persuasion as human beings. Additionally, since social media includes any and all opinions from its users, misinformation may spread quickly and can greatly affect how public opinion is shaped



To further build on this, both the Narrative Paradigm and Gatekeeping theories can be applied to social media and may help explain why we communicate in this way. The narrative paradigm, as discussed in my class lecture this week, explains how humans are natural storytellers and use stories to make sense of things in the world. With this, personal stories often involve the use of pathos or appeal to emotion, which is highly persuasive. In Chapter 15 of Human Communication, it states "Narratives are also powerful strategies for introducing emotion because stories often detail the experiences of others and create identification between the audience and those mentioned in the stories" (Pearson et al., 2021). On social media, the use of stories can easily resonate with others and thus persuade them while not including any logic or rationale. 


Additionally, the Gatekeeping theory which describes the control of information theory also greatly influences communication. For social media to work as well as it does, it contains algorithms to keep people engaged and do this by presenting them with things they like or have expressed an interest in in the past. However, these personalized algorithms can be problematic in that your side of social media only gets you exposure to opinions that align with your own which only reinforces current beliefs, leading to polarization. 


Overall, social media is a very powerful tool and we must understand how it works and the way people communicate to ensure proper utilization. 



References: 

Pearson, J. C., Nelson, P. E., Titsworth, S., & Hosek, A. M. (2021). Human communication (7th ed.). Mcgraw-Hill Education.


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