The Old Two-Step Flow

Sounds like a dance, the old two-step flow. You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out ... and so on and so on. But I was thinking the other day about the shrinking news audience, especially a more partisan news audience, and I came to wonder whether the old two-step flow and opinion leaders, concepts from the early days of mass comm research, haven't become even more important.

Briefly, the concepts have to do with interpersonal communication, of opinion leaders passing information down to others. The media inform some, who in turn inform others. Water cooler chatter. Back fence talk. Elevator conversation material. All that stuff. With a mass audience this seems less important, but now with a highly fragmented audience with relatively few opting for news versus entertainment, it seems to me we'll see more reliance on what people about the news since many don't (or won't) consume it.

You know the routine, those people who say "I heard it on TV" or "I read it online somewhere" and then repeate a badly remembered factoid, which may or may not be true, but it becomes true to them because not only do they vaguely remember it, but they have repeated it to someone else. And then those people, who don't consume news themselves, are unlikely to have that factoid challenged because they don't attend to the news. They accept it, maybe pass it on to others.

Scary world.

Any solution? Not much of one, I'm afraid. A lot of people have fled the news for entertainment, for quality programming like Dancing with the Stars. What they "hear" from others will inform their opinions, their votes.

Yup. Scary world.

Talking to People Like Yourself

An ongoing thread of research questions whether there is some political risk to hanging out and talking to people who are pretty much like ourselves. The theory is that we're better off with a network of folks who disagree with our points of view. This will expose people to other viewpoints. But the reality is we tend to have interpersonal networks that look a lot like ourselves.

Some folks tested whether it matters in terms of political knowledge -- is your conversational network made up of people who agree with you, or people who disagree.

The result? It "suggests that individuals who reside in diverse networks benefit little from frequent political talk, whereas those surrounded by like-minded discussion partners appear to acquire significantly more knowledge as a function of increasing discussion." The article appeared in a 2008 issue of Communication Research.

At first I found this counterintuitive, and there are some caveats. The authors use issue knowledge and it has a lousy Cronbach's Alpha of .47. That's troubling, so much so I'm a little surprised the research got through the journal's vetting process. Their background knowledge index performs significantly better.

I don't want to go all PhDweeb on this one, but the authors have some neat suggestions on why they found what they did. Maybe negative or non-supporting conversations confuse people to the degree that knowledge gets all messed up. Perhaps affect gets in the way of learning. This is odd since there are some suggestions that advertising, even negative adds, improve learning. As scholars often do, almost as boilerplate, there is a call for more research to tease out what's going on here.

Media, Talk, and What People Know

There has been a growing body of scholarly work that examines our interpersonal networks as opposed to media consumption as reasons for what we think, how we act, and what we learn. Some of it I've covered before, such as the fact that our personal networks are more and more made up of people like ourselves. Thus we tend to think our viewpoints are shared by more people, when it turns we are merely getting a reflection of our own views.

Neat stuff. One study looks at young people and the role of talking to friends about politics versus using the media. The results are not surprising. Or maybe they are.

1. Young people use the media to have something to talk about with friends, but they learn more from these conversations than they do from the media.
2. Give young people a little information and they often want more, especially if that initial information is engaging (like a debate, so we'll find out if the infamous YouTube debates matter in later research. I'm guessing ... maybe).
3. Conflicting information baffles young people. This is probably due in part to their lack of base information, so they struggle to deal with competing arguments. The study doesn't address this, but I can see a problem here. What if young people, who struggle with conflicting info, say the hell with it and search out a single source to tell them like it is? The result is a lack of exposure to competing arguments. Not good for them, not good for democracy.
4. Young people love the Internet. This may have something to do with the findings in #3 above, because the Net is full of conflict, kinda like talk radio on acid.
5. Over a third of young people report talking about politics on a daily basis. Wow! News organizations need to find a way to tap into this and sell the idea that they can provide young people with info for those conversations. This is an old uses and gratifications approach, for those of a PhDweeb persuasion.
6. Young people see the mainstream news media as somewhat credible, but less than their friends. Not a good development.

Overall, this study and a host of others are looking at media, personal networks, and young people to help us understand what the opinion climate might look like in a few years. After reading a lot of this stuff, I'd like to say I'm hopeful. I'd like to say we'll be okay.

I''d like to, but I can't.