Group Three.

Bernard Cohen’s agenda setting theory ceases to amaze me in its how largely it affects the circulation of various news outlets, especially today with the use of social media and the Internet. In the good old days when major newspapers needed to have someone on the ground to confirm that an event was occurring, what happens now when the news is found all over Twitter, Facebook, and their competing news websites? A news station cannot leave it unreported and left with untimely news events, so they engage in the bandwagon effect, where one breaking story sets the fundamental “agenda” for others to follow. Even though major news companies still have their own unique, distinct feature stories, this seems to be the repeated occurrence. Two major stories that broke this past summer, and turned out to be false, are good illustrations of how this has impacted the information that we consume. The Gay Girl in Damascus, which happened to be a 36-year-old man living in America, and the supposed Virginia Tech shooter that was sited by children there for summer camp. No one had ever confirmed either of these stories (summer campers don’t seem to be an accurate source) but they were repeatedly referred to, for different reasons, and through the salience effect were made of interest to the American public. Castells said that we are not an information society but an ever increasingly networked society, and those networks that we weave seem to be extending beyond who we are personally connected to.