Individuals, groups, and agenda melding: A theory of social dissonance

Many studies have established that there is a degree of audience learning f rom che mass media, especially of new issues entering the news. But recent studies shove an agenda-setting effect at deeper levels beyond broad news c ategories. Audiences also absorb the attributes of news-the frames and slan ts 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. Be yond these two levels of agenda setting, however, is something more signifi cant-agenda melding. Agenda melding argues that individuals join groups, in rt sense, by joining agendas. There is a powerful impulse to affiliate wit h. Others in groups as one leaves the original family setting, and one join s these groups via media of connections, mostly other people but also other media. This paper suggests a model of agenda melding that accounts Far 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 hom individuals function with others in a coherent social system.