Topic: Social media negates agenda capture by elites and their ability to cascade

1 Found helpful • 5 Pages • Essays / Projects • Year: Pre-2021

Introduction: The increasing integration of social media usage into daily routine has revolutionised the way people search for, understand and influence to the agendas which usually captured and framed by a group of elites. Typically, agenda is seen as the “collection of problems, understanding of causes, symbols, solutions, and other elements of public problems to come to the attention of members of the public and their governmental officials” (Birkland 2014) In the context of political communication, elites frame their agenda in a way as to encourage certain interpretations. Political figures attempt to frame issues in a way that makes a solution favouring their own political position as the right solution for the problem. In this case, social media serves as the key platform for political communication, which actually produces and spread the news to the broader society and allows the audience to access, understand and react to the information (MacQuail 2010, p. 98). Thus, social media is used as a tool to enforce agendas while at the same time cascading information to the general public. This essay contends that social media undermines elites’ agenda and their secrets, nevertheless, social media is incapable of completely disrupt its ability to cascade. The first section elaborate on the two key characteristics, content-driving community and inclusiveness, in explaining why social media negates the agenda capture by elites. Then, the second section considers a set of factors which including media monopoly and government censorship, to argue that the social media has limited influence in restricting the elites’ ability to cascade.

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