INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, AND AGENDA MELDING: A THEORY OF SOCIAL DISSONANCE

Many studies have established that there is a degree of audience learning from the mass media, especially of new issues entering the news. But recent studies show an agenda-setting effect at deeper levels beyond broad news categories. Audiences also absorb the attributes of news—the frames and slants in the way news is presented—and this suggests that while the mass media do not tell us what to think, the mass media do have considerable power to tell us how to think about topics, with implications for social policy. Beyond these two levels of agenda setting, however, is something more significant—agenda melding. Agenda melding argues that individuals join groups, in a sense, by joining agendas. There is a powerful impulse to affiliate with others in groups as one leaves the original family setting, and one joins these groups via media of connections, mostly other people but also other media. This paper suggests a model of agenda melding that accounts for the role of media (mass or interpersonal) in helping individuals move toward or away from groups. This attempts to build toward general social theory by suggesting the role of media in how individuals function with others in a coherent social system. Mass media agenda setting research can be visualized in a larger setting, broader than audience learning from the mass media, and can be as useful if recast as an ongoing social process through which individuals relate to larger groups by media of connections, including the press, other people, or other sources. An agenda of issues is more than just a ranking of issues from most to least emphasized. It is a set of priorities that attracts individuals seeking to avoid social isolation. Expanding upon agenda setting's idea of need for orientation as an explanation for what brings people to a medium in the first place, we speculate that individuals are driven to remove the social dissonance of being alone and/or dealing with ambiguity in a complex, interconnected world (see Swanson, 1988). Something more fundamental is involved than just becoming informed during a political campaign. We argue that the drive to remove socia