Evangeline B. Fernandez- ABMC4- Monday/ 2:30- 5:30pm

SETTING THE AGENDA

Agenda Setting is all about planning what things are we going to do and how we set our ideas and plans for a certain thing or event and to think of what is important. It is concerned on how we perceive or think about things, how we communicate, how we can explain it and how we feel about it.

As a mass communication student, we have different opinions and thoughts that’s why we arranged our ideas in order to form a good agenda. Like for example in a political agenda, politicians hire a good PR professional to help them arrange their ideas and plans to make a good political campaign and build their good image. After they plan it, they will think of different ways on how they will inform the public and how they will deliver it to them. They exchange their opinions to one another to produce a good outcome on their goals.

Two concepts in Agenda- setting theory:

1. Issue Salience- which is the mass media’s ability of transferring information or important issues from their own agendas to the public agendas.

2. Cognitive Priming- it is the personal experience or connection of the person involved in an issue.


DIFFUSING INFORMATION AND INNOVATION

It is a way of disseminating messages from one person to another as well as from the source to the sender up to the receiver or the destination. This involves social interaction, communication and exchanging of information. Like for example in media, they collect or gather facts and useful information or get it from their sources, they arrange it, disseminate it through a medium (TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc.) and send or deliver it to their audiences or to the public. If the audience or the public received it, they will give comments or opinions and they will talk about it, because of this there will be a feedback from the audiences and interaction among people of the public will occur. Communication of people plays an important role on this.

Diffusing of Innovation- It is the adoption of new ideas, media, technology and etc. and how these things spread through cultures.

There are three types of innovation:

Optional Innovation-Decision- this decision is made by an individual who is in some way distinguished from others in a social system.
Collective Innovation-Decision- this decision is made collectively by all individuals of a social system.
Authority Innovation-Decision- this decision is made for the entire social system by few individuals in positions of influence or power.

DEFINING SOCIAL SUPPORT

Every man have different views, ideas, and opinions about things. Sometimes we think that our opinions and thoughts are conflict with the opinions and thoughts of others because of our differences, but we tend to remain silent on this matter. The “Spiral of Salience” is a theory which suggests that a phenomenon commonly referred to as the silent majority.

For example, in a group of friends, when they plan to have a group outdoor activities, sometimes there are circumstances that there will be one or two in the group who will object or disagree with the plan of the others and this will make things complicated to them. Because of this, some of them will remain silent because they don’t want to and some of them will support the idea and will insist to gain support from each other to make their plan possible.

Even if a majority agree on the plan but do not individually recognize social support, their silence and inactivity can lead to a big conclusion that not many people support a particular view.

Each of us need social support from the people we rely or expect too much to in order to do what we think and what we want in order to make things better.