THE INTERNET, POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW INFORMATION PARADIGM

THE INTERNET, POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH AND THE SEARCH

FOR A NEW INFORMATION PARADIGM

INTRODUCTION

The quality of public discourse is critical to legitimizing the electoral process in a

democracy. Informed consent depends on the freedom to produce, share and criticize material

political information. Political scientists can provide insight into democratic governance if they

can measure political information exchange and assess the conflict between authoritative control

and free expression. The Internet, as a digital record of human discourse, provides an opportunity

to directly analyze political communicative behavior. Existing theories of political

communications are inadequate to confront the multitude variables instantiated by digital

communication. New types of actors communicate in all directions across new types of channels

and in different temporal contexts. To address this challenge, adapting information (Shannon and

Weaver 1998) and linguistic theory (Levinas 1979), we propose a functional framework that

enables us to illuminate the conceptual relationships between agents, analyze information flows

in dynamic rather than static context, integrate existing research, elucidate the prospects for

individual expression against control in a digital networks, and move the field into the

information age.

In their conceptualizations of political communication, social and political theorists have

differed in their definition of the critical actor, the powers they assign to these agents and the

conditions for action. Liberal theorists valorize the individual and advance arguments for the

efficiency (Mill 1992) of a natural right to self-expression (Rousseau 1990; Locke 2003) that

achieves discursive equilibrium in society through some hidden clearing mechanism of a market

of ideas (Abram v. United States, Holmes 1919). In contrast, sociological theorists emphasize

discursive class struggle (Marx) between a class (Althusser 1971; Habermas 1989) that creates

and distributes information and a mass public that passively receives and accepts. If there is a

manufacture of popular mandate (Schumpeter 1987), or an equilibrium of idea exchange, how

would one study it?

Empirical research reflects the theoretical optics embedded into their epistemologies. The

study of personality, cognitive and affective processes or uttered expression is a study of the

individual. Inquiry into institutions, government or media company power is an examination of

collective forces. Analysts focused on the person’s internal processing locate discursive power in

individuals who select, filter, absorb or recall political information (Festinger 1957; Marcus et al.

2000; 2007). On this view, political communication becomes an exercise in extrapolating the

black box of information processing. Alternately, maximal-effect approaches such as agenda

setting (McCombs and Shaw 1993; Iyengar and Kinder 2010;) and content framing analysis

(Entman 1993; Wolfsfeld 2011) locate discursive power in formal political authorities who tell

people what to think (Entman 2010). Scholars advocating minimal effects demur and argue that

in a democracy, individuals are not victims of a propagandized mass ideology (Converse 1964).

People may rely on intermediaries who translate mass messaging in a two-step flow model of

communication (Katz and Lazarsfeld 2006) or absorb peer pressure from published public

opinion (Mutz 1998).

A review of the literature returns three findings: communication has been considered a

dependent function of whatever variable has been assigned primary importance; most studies

focus on absorption effects, which is a limitation of survey-use; and citizens are viewed as net

receivers rather than as producers of political information. In contrast, we propose a new

framework that elevates the importance of communication and assigns communicative power on

the basis of a person’s location in a message transmission. A functional logic of communication

shapes the relationships between interlocutors and confers capacities on actors to produce,

consume, or convey information. Social, political and economic characteristics do not fully

define communicative power – people possess networks, some public or formal, others private

and informal, to which they can output information.

Using the Internet, we can study speech in action and explore how individuals propagate

information flows in linked dynamic expression. Combining theory with symbolic notation, we

develop a functional model that defines actor types, actions, objects and the relationships

between them. We start from the simple communication sequence and build to the complex,

achieving a modular theory of information flows that is readily scaled. This allows the analyst to

choose his level of analysis, from micro to macro. As we expand the model, we examine the

political considerations that intersect with communications goals and explore archetypal

scenarios of single and multiple speaker; direct and mediated communication; single and

multiple receiver; synchronous and asynchronous time horizons; and fixed, mixed and random

messaging matrices. By combining different variables, we are able to analyze the abstract

conditions that people face when they communicate and delve into the tension between

authoritative control and grassroots expression in greater detail. We also re-appraise existing

research findings such as agenda-setting and content bias in functional terms. More importantly,

by pushing the logic of information flow to its limits, we highlight the conceptual possibilities

for information interaction and identify new areas for future research.

The thesis is divided into two sections and eight chapters. Chapter 1 begins with a review

of existing research and theories. Critics have averred that research findings in political

communication have either not been integrated into a coherent whole or have disagreed (Bennett

and Iyengar 2008) due to the lack of a robust theoretic model that can account for the disparate

actors, actions and phenomena. Studies span a wide spectrum from the study of charismatic

personality (Lasswell 1927; 1930), to agenda-setting (McCombs and Shaw 1993; Iyengar and

Kinder 2010), two-step flow theory (Katz and Lazarsfeld 2006), public media opinion (Zaller

1992; Pew Center 2011), cognitive bias (Lord et al. 1979; Taber and Lodge 2006) selective

exposure (Sunstein 2001; 2007; Eveland and Shah 2003); cascading activation (Entman 2003;

2010), and institutional mass communications studies (Lippman 1922). We argue that these

diverse programs can in fact be linked by abstracting from tangible political phenomena – e.g.

the President, the state, television programming – to objects as defined by their communicative

function. For example, an agenda-setting experiment is simply an absorption measurement after

exposure to a single stream message sequence with component weights.

Chapter 2 introduces the analytic framework, starting with an analysis of the basic

principles of communication. Employing logic and symbolic notation, we define the basic linear

sequence as a formal relation between a speaker, message object and hearer. This sequence is the

building block in our communications flow paradigm; no matter how complex, parallel and serial

messaging streams can be deconstructed into linear sequences subject to some temporal context.

Chapter 3 examines message creation. We argue that authors draw on a collection of discrete

components, from fact and analysis to opinion and falsehood, to draft political messages that are

geared toward persuasion over truth. Since no message is complete and transcendental, there is

always space for competitors to intervene in order to repudiate or corroborate. To understand the

public effects of political communication, message transit must be explored.

Chapter 4 introduces intermediaries and the costs and benefits of amplification and carriage.

When there is mediation, signals can change or be redirected. Here the analysis focuses on

conceptual metrics, defines noise and distortion in messaging and illustrates how the analyst can

measure message change and assign responsibility to specific actors. We investigate the use of

quality control and examine how feedback loops manage for message deviation. In Section

Two, we begin to explore complex models of communication. Chapter 5 explores the

ramifications of multiple message streams from multiple speakers as the analysis builds towards

constructing a more realistic, rich signal information environment. The importance of time is

introduced as a constraint on a speaker’s narrative reputation, credibility and authority. We aver

that the logic of communication demands consistency and constancy in messaging and that this

cannot be escaped even in single speaker environments.

Having covered a minimum set of speakers, actions, relations and constraints, the thesis

begins in Chapter 6 to evaluate how messaging expands from single stream linear sequences to

multiple nodes. Using matrix notation, the model illustrates the potential for rapid expansion

when speakers activate nodes that have large connected branches. Political speakers seek an

audience and may use particular channels to reach niche demographics or sharpen messages for

particular partisan consumption. Competing message streams are arrayed in order to analyze the

different types of information feeds that citizens receive. The possibility of agenda setting is

analyzed given asymmetric news input across time for individuals.

Chapter 7 discusses the ramifications of heterogeneous exposure conditions for political

speakers and examines how speakers can adjust their broadcast strategies to cope with

nonuniformity in reception. In both Chapters 6 and 7, amplification strategies are considered

from the perspective of message control. How do speakers and receivers navigate fragmented

information fields?

In Chapter 8, we examine how inter-connective digital technologies transform the

communicative powers of individuals. We demonstrate how digital formats transform

connectivity and sharing for proximate and distal, known and unknown audiences. Individuals

can create information flows that operate parallel to, intervene in or remain detached from formal

channels. Participation can be broad or narrow, occur in limited or all directions and occur

synchronously or asynchronously. The fact that data can appear and disappear raises questions of

provenance and forces us to contemplate the prospects of Mill’s lone voice finding support in a

networked world. Noting that digital data can be replicated perfectly and re-conveyed at

historically low capital cost, we argue that technology empowers the individual to intervene

forcefully in political discourse. The power of growing individual expression is captured in

notation form using expanding, multiplying matrices. Rationalizing information flows into a

system of discrete components, we are thus able to analyze how people create, distribute or

intervene in message streams.

In summary, drawing on information and linguistic theory, our analytic framework

accomplishes six objectives: 1) we build a modular, scalable theory of information flows that

enables analysis of dynamic expression; 2) we evaluate message delivery, create metrics for

signal fidelity and define an information flow lexicon; 3) we show how individual actors, linked

by the micro information streams they receive and transmit, co-constitute their political

information environment; 4) we illuminate the array of signaling, amplification and reception

strategies speakers have and illustrate with clear examples, the struggle over message control; 5)

we demonstrate how existing research can be integrated into an information flow paradigm and;

6) by advancing a signal processing approach that accounts for digital technologies, we lay the

groundwork for research that can use computational linguistics and data mining techniques to

best effect.

To understand the potential of digital shared communication for democratic

selfexpression, one must understand the mechanics of the phenomenon. It is to this task that the

focus now turns.

CHAPTER 1: REVIEW OF THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

The study of political communication can be broken into the broad areas of theory,

methodology and subject matter. Multiplying an approach by a method and a topic quickly

results in many areas of research for which there may be little to no overlap leading to the

impression that research is fragmented if not fractured. On the one hand, scholars in each domain

and sub-discipline may rightly claim to study political communication. On the other hand, given

the special conditions, assumptions and even minutiae of each researcher’s particular focus, one

might also claim that the sum of the work is less than the parts. The proverbial elephant is

defined and described properly from each point of view but the aggregate fails to cohere. One

way to avoid this is to step back and reconsider the enterprise by scrutinizing one’s epistemology

and goals as students of both politics and communication. A theory of political communication

can define the information environment and the public sphere in different ways. How theories

accomplish this says much about their foundational stakes and research programs.

The first move is to recognize the importance of communications as a shaper of politics.

Politics and communications each bring their own claims, objectives, methods and paradigms.

An archetypal analysis of each discipline can provide insight into three main areas and illuminate

the manner in which assumptions and methods affect the conception and subsequent

investigation of political information interchange. In what ways has existing political

communications research answered enduring questions raised by theorists of politics, social

inquiry, language and knowledge? What kinds of methods and tools have been developed and

deployed to explicate the mechanics of authorship and idea dissemination and thus of knowledge

activation and spread? And what data have been evaluated, including issues, topics, actors and

systems? Is there a way to link the various phenomena that scholars and theorists label political

communication? The common denominator that may help integrate disparate work is to

acknowledge the primacy of communication and address its inherent logic of action. A functional

approach that analyzes and illuminates the directives that shape actor-to-actor relations in terms

of information exchange can unify such diverse work as agenda setting, media opinion studies,

information bias, content and framing analysis.

When scholars approach the problem of political communication their primary concerns

fundamentally shape the way in which they define their subject matter and consequently, their

assessment of the appropriate methods for investigation. Political scientists, theorists and

philosophers are concerned with analyzing, arguing or explaining the basis of actual or ideal

politics. In either case, politics is a human centered study and action revolves around matters of

individuals, organizations and their rights, duties and obligations. A byproduct of this inquiry

touches upon how people communicate. The exchange of ideas is the concomitant to a set of

political assumptions. Neoclassical liberal theorists expound the virtue of individual expression

as an extension of right (Rousseau 1990; Locke 2003), guardian of truth (Mill) and mechanism

of resolution (Holmes). And yet they remain aware that interchange may not go smoothly, the

interests of the people can run hot and passions can ruin the project of government if not

unchecked (Federalist Papers). Counter to this stand those concerned with systemic power and

the control of government and the engines of idea dissemination. Sociological theorists worry

about the structure of the archeology of knowledge (Foucault), the oppressive power of the

structuring environment (Durkheim 1982; Althusser 1971) and the façade of free will

manufactured by puppet masters who stage elections while remaining behind the scenes

(Schumpeter 1987; Domhoff 2010). If liberal theorists valorize the power of individual

expression, skeptics underscore the oppressive capacity to control how and what to think

(Entman 2007). For both groups of scholars, political communication is a study of agency versus

structure, which type of actor prevails, when and how? As a result analysis centers on abstract

argument that concerns itself with rights and power. The public sphere is the background to this

struggle and emanations into discursive space are defined in terms of political actors and actions

– ruler and subject, socioeconomic class struggle, free will and mass propaganda. Modern

theorists recognize the problem of resistance and seek ways to create conditions for deliberation

(Habermas 1962, 1981; Gutmann 2004) as a form of civil, organized political engagement.

Deliberation is a form of political communication but it is entwined with the question of

governance and is not considered as a standalone phenomenon. If the political analyst is

entrained to a dominant political theoretic position, he will likely embark on a research program

that explores communications within the parameters of his training and optics.

Actors can be construed as individual, organization and system. Some have argued that

there is an autopoietic quality to the modern mass media (Luhmann 2000). Having achieved

incredible scale and resources, the institutions of mass communications – the news gathering,

content creation, content editing, signal broadcasting, news and entertainment conglomerates are

so large as to structure social reality by virtue of a presence in every domain of life as reporter,

newsmaker, opinion monger and fact provider and checker. Although humans staff information

entities, run its presses and transmit broadcasts, the system as a whole has an internal logic that is

self-supporting beyond the control of individuals. Political communication among the people or

between political actors and the public is a secondary condition of the mass media’s priorities.

The expression of ideas does not germinate from below nor does it get delivered from on high;

rather the distribution system determines who and what gets coverage, programming time and

thus sociopolitical importance. The mechanisms of information production thus overwhelm.

Along this vein but against this argument, other observers aver that individuals are actually

empowered by technology (Pool 1984). The pace of advancement in devices has shrunk space

and time such that people can communicate instantly no matter where they are. Proximity was

once a barrier – communication only exists in contact and prior to media, exchange could only

occur in person. The rise of paper and other stable forms of interchange, particularly the

emergence of the moveable bloc type printing press meant that distal communication could occur

with latency of exchange a condition of delivery. The shorter the wait time, the sooner people

could communicate. The rise of a durable medium also enabled the emergence of an anonymous

press of criticism and resistance that could be distributed in secret or shared to the public. On this

basis political communication acquired a new dimension, freedom from identity. Whereas

provenance often establishes credibility, good, truthful and right argument can stand alone. On

this basis, the public sphere emerges as a space where ideas can circulate on their own merit

(Warner), a concept that is further developed with the market of ideas analog (Holmes). The

mechanics of communication are susceptible to technological change not just as an expedient in

existing methods but as a platform for new modes and means of interaction and participation.

Students of industrialization and the rise of the modern era point to gleaming examples of the

bureaucratic, rational state and the development of big government and big corporation. These

factors also affect the manner in which political ideas are shared. When the people en masse can

be reached in a one or few to many relationship, messaging is unidirectional and those who

control speech and broadcasting have great influence over authoritative accounts of important

events and their presentation. This reality and the subversion of individual agency towards

deterministic rather deliberative options, moved scholars wary of propaganda and its effects to

pessimistic analysis (Lasswell 1927). At the same time, the conjoined rise of the nascent print

media and tilted or yellow journalism led others to be both critic and aspirant and argue for the

merits of the fourth estate as a mechanism to help democracy by publishing truth rather than

settling for power and the installation of preferences and norms (Lippman 1922).

Turning from the broad strokes of political communication writ large, other researchers look to

the data to see if they can illuminate how people talk to each other and relate what the data show.

How are political ideas exchanged between types of political actors – political elites and citizens,

government and the press, the people and the press and other such dyads? In empirical study,

there are two major tracks, one that focuses on actors and their choices and another that focuses

on content and its effects.

Advances in methods and the rise of social and behavioral sciences led to an examination

of political communication with new tools and returned new findings. The incorporation of

statistics and surveys enabled researchers to measure the effect of information exposure in small

groups and large. Given the engine of the mass media, how does it operate? As a carrier of

political ideas, Lazarsfeld and Katz (2006) argued that information followed a two-step flow

path, where opinion leaders interpreted and helped direct discussion and synthesis of information

received from mass media. In this formulation, the public sphere is deconstructed into stages

with two important characteristics; input remains unidirectional and the reach of the mass media

is mediated.

In similar vein but with different outcome, researchers looked to investigate the granular

mechanics of information exposure and developed the agenda-setting hypothesis based on

experiment. Given a controlled stream of political news and information in simulated and

manipulated broadcasts, subjects expressed views and priority rankings about political topics in

ways that reflected their information exposure. The minimal effect of mass media described by

Lazarsfeld thus became the maximal effect of individual malleability (McCombs and Shaw

1993). Substantive findings and the import of the agenda-setting research program are

compelling, important, and well-replicated (Bennett and Iyengar 2004) but agenda setting does

not completely account for the operation of political communication because it accounts for only

one type of information input, is limited in its ability to comprehend long duration and most

importantly, cannot handle the more plausible reality of a mixed signal, differential exposure

information field that people actually encounter. To this point more discussion fill follow.

If people reflect their information streams, in what way do they do so and for what types of

subjects and under what conditions? Can one extrapolate the power of agenda setting to certain

topics? Does it work as well for issues that have limited access for verification, such as military

action as it does for subjects that common citizens can eyewitness, such as a natural disaster?

The larger question scholars have posed revolves around control and effect. What narratives

prevail and why? What effect do they have? Does framing manipulation succeed better in some

arenas for example foreign policy, national security and the privilege of the executive (Entman

2003) and not others?

Agenda setting can also be defined in functional terms. It is a beam of information that

shapes thought through a top-down flow structure. Archetypally, political authority crafts a

message by filtering down through formal management structures of the Presidency, Congress

and preferred expert consultants, the media and finally the public. The first groups of actors have

the capacity to provide feedback upstream with their power to do so diminishing as one moves

down the chain. The cascade ends with the people whose ability to speak to power is confined to

polls and general articulations of public opinion or possibly public and social outrage (Entman

1989; 1993). Unlike the approaches discussed earlier, a cascading activation model

acknowledges the role of downstream actors in shaping a message stream. But it remains limited

in application in part because it is tightly alloyed to a model of authoritative power. That is,

whereas information flows in all directions, truth is discoverable and anyone can be witness,

judge and speaker. A political communications model that is designed along to track government

structure presupposes the prerogative of authorship and authority and minimizes or ignores the

possibility of non-formal authorities contributing to or even issuing information streams or

building their own networks.

At the same time, people seem to respond to what they ingest. Manipulation of narratives

can skew stories toward one political pole or another. If the media is biased, there must be a way

to measure this. Content analysis provides a way to examine how stories are conveyed and

research can follow different avenues. The first approach is to examine the manner in which bias

can affect the news people receive. One manifestation is with respect to access. Focusing on

information streams or the supply side, it is possible that the information people receive follows

the “fit to print” sentiment, which is at once a noble ethos and high-minded form of censorship.

What can circulate is not a function of truth, political importance or social significance but of the

demands, preferences and choices of the agent who controls either authorship or distribution.

This condition, termed gate-keeping bias (White 1950; D’Alessio and Allen 2000) describes the

preemptive foreclosing of information by winnowing topics and themes according to whatever

mandate is installed by the relevant actor, be it individual journalist, editor or publishing regime.

When journalists, editors and publishers are selective in what they cover (Zhong and Newhagen

2009; Levite 1996) and in what they publish or broadcast, the full spectrum of voices and of truly

newsworthy items is not represented. Similarly, information providers may exhibit bias in their

decision-making due to particular cognitive-emotional frameworks or schemas (Scheufele and

Scheufele 2010) that implicitly cause them to favor and thus relate particular issues and topics.

Worry over tilt finds expression in the bandied about “liberal media bias” and the retort that an

intermediary, News Corporation’s Fox News, will instead be “fair and balanced.” On this point,

some critics have argued that surveys show journalists to be liberal in their personal views and

politics and therefore they likely screen the universe of events and the thematic possibilities of

candidate stories in order to valorize liberal causes while diminishing conservative ones

(Schneider and Lewis 1985). In contrast, others note that instead, the reverse holds - media

companies, as profit seeking capitalist corporations are conservative, pro-profit and therefore

pro-business and therefore encourage or orient their staff to produce items that dovetail with their

economic agenda. On this basis, the raison d’etre of being a professional journalist supersedes

any personal bias and employees, whether journalist or producer, select and transmit items that

favor their employer (Liebling 1964/1975; Cooper and Soley 1990; Lee and Solomon 1991).

Regardless of direction, looking forward to the development of the analytic model of

communications in chapter 3, the primary takeaway is that agents who control access can and do

play an important role in the structure of network flows and the content they admit to their

pipeline.

Political communication can also be tilted by two other types of action, coverage bias and

statement bias. Whereas gatekeeping (D'Alessio and Allen 2000) operates at the level of the actor

and is concerned with nodes on the network, coverage and statement bias deal with the substance

of messaging itself. Given the real constraints of space and time for publication or broadcasting

and the nature of positioning within these formats, the allocation of coverage

affects the presentation and thus the reach and impact of information. To omit is to silence and

failure to report is to ignore a subject completely. When the public is not informed and if they do

not have independent means for acquisition, coverage bias can tilt knowledge toward favored

ends. Coverage bias can manifest itself in positioning – headers, titling, lead-ins, time or space

allocation – and the inequities in presentation restrict the spectrum of topics for public

deliberation through highlight and de-emphasis.

Messaging can also be corrupted by statement bias or content bias (Entman 2007), the

form most often associated with media tilt. What and how something is said can trigger certain

emotions, propagandize or trivialize, objectify or extol. When putative neutral parties interject

their opinions and values into discourse, they take advantage of the semblance of objectivity to

inveigle subversive thought (D'Alessio and Allen 2000). When one deals only in truth and

falsehood, lies are more easily discriminated. In fact, information flows may suffer from

distortion bias, which confounds truth and fiction and content bias (Entman 2007).

As researchers investigate content flows, one discovery leads to testing and perhaps new

findings. Against agenda setting and the corruption of political discourse that biased reporting

deliver, researchers who study how people acquire their information on a cognitive basis paint a

more optimistic picture for democracy. People may suffer from confirmation bias and attitude

polarization (Lord, Ross and Lepper 1979; Lodge and Taber 2006) and choose to reinforce what

they presume or already know but they may also screen and reject information, discriminate,

filter from multiple sources and thus exhibit agency (Stroud 2010) and rational analysis.

It may be true that partisans look for like minds and radicals foment more radical speech.

Under this assumption, digital interconnectedness provides space and forums for the exchange of

ideas too marginal or incendiary for formal channels. On this view, political communication

tends to atomize into increasingly extreme niches (Sunstein 2002, 2007) and individuals are

more likely to disagree simply because they ignore news edited for the public good in favor of

content designed to meet their expectations.

Given the various types of biases and the introduction of actor and message level

analyses, the concept of the public sphere can be updated once again. It is no longer an abstract

space of struggle or a sphere managed top down by large institutions but a complex network of

actors who have different capabilities and interests. Collectively, these actors can structurate

(Giddens 1987) their information environment and stock their world with information, including

subjects, slants, values and propositions. In such a model, the next step in research is to

anticipate the discrete flows that constitute the system.

Political communication thus finds another formulation as the interplay of individuals

engaging with their governing institutions. Citizens extract information about their duties and

obligations and about the problems and successes of policy and government from an

environment replete with many active, mixed political signals (Shen and Eveland 2010). These

signals come from multitude types of speakers (Jerit, Barabas et al. 2006), variable in terms of

political or social authority. Some are expert others are error-prone. Speakers may represent a

wide range identities, defined in the postmodern era in countless ways and show skill in

persuasion in all manner of subject.

It is at this point that political communications studies confront the promise and

possibility of the Internet and a digital age. The barrier to entry onto information network is

historically low; children now use smart digital devices and learn from remote and cloud based

information servers. This is not the critical change, however. What matters is that individuals can

now issue their own streams and partake in the sharing of their values, beliefs, knowledge and

opinions. The ideal of a democracy supported by deliberation, access to truth and informed

consent is more possible than ever. Technology, by eliminating obstacles to audience and

networks and obviating time lag and intermediary blocking, has transformed the practice of

political communication. Speakers intervene in political discourse across various media, use

different channels, simultaneously or at intervals, and command variable levels of channel

bandwidth. News initiators can output their message with variable intensity or amplitude, with

different frequency and with variable specificity in the aiming of their message to a slew of

targeted audiences. With a plethora of channels to choose from, private or public, corporate or

non-profit, people have options for news, thus minimizing the effect of any agenda setting.

Governance can benefit the people if policy makers open direct lines of communication with the

people. By leveraging technology government can improve communication and service and

encourage pluralist participation (Bimber 1998; Jennings and Zeitner 2003).

All is not rosy though in a digital world. Students familiar with the mechanics of Internet

protocols, search engines and site traffic worry that structural determinants invisibly shape how

people rely on the Internet for data (Lessig 1999). The virtue of access is that anyone can upload

and create a shareable resource, the hidden truth may be that the algorithms of data mining,

information retrieval and search skew what people can find on the basis of a power law that

favors already dominant sites and information providers. Political communication is thus not

unfettered but is constrained by the Web’s underlying technologies. Apparent innocuous site

browsing or data inquiries may have political ramifications if they are monitored; a life lived

online is not discreet in the way a life lived in reality is. If privacy is at risk (Turow, King et al.

2009) so is freedom. Participation in constituting the digitized public sphere may be tilted by the

actions of influential, profit-seeking private firms (Rogers 2004); (Lessig 1999; Lessig 2001;

Lessig 2006); (Boyle 2008). If this is the case, the drastic leveling of the playing field may not be

assured. Given the nature of information distribution by a new breed of actor, the information

platform provider, for some a pluralist information environment is more fantasy than reality

(Hindman 2009). Add to this the fact that a person’s actions can be tracked by time, place and

access point – the database tracking cookie inserted on the Web-access computer – and it seems

that the promise of private networks to balance formal channels of information is not what it

seems. Independent supervision, criticism and resistance, critical to ensuring the legitimacy of

democracy, are hollow if it can be recorded and tracked by those who have the power to coerce.

In democracy, who governs (Dahl 1961) or who rules (Domhoff 2010) may well be discovered in

who controls the information staging ground.

Building on the above findings, this thesis integrates existing research by proposing a

functional model of communication that enables greater insight into the mechanics of specific

phenomena – coverage bias, statement bias, framing – as well as provides a way to link instances

of such phenomena to the actors in a complete transmit to receive loop. Actors are specified and

their array of choices within a signal transmission is defined. Examples are then given to

illuminate the action choices available at each point in a message sequence and to differentiate

the strategies that are intrinsic to the roles an agent can play in the conveyance of information.

The prospect of agenda setting is evaluated in a multiple signal, mixed message environment.

Furthermore, the importance of time is considered –reception conditions change over time and

the model provides a way to account for the dynamics of content streaming. As the model is

developed, new areas of interchange become apparent including reasons for parallel

amplification and changes in signal frequency and duration. In addition, the potential of a digital

universe is adduced. Variables that were not in play in mass communications now appear.

Directness and bi-directionality complicate the information picture as people have their own

social networks that they have transposed to the Web. These networks provide collaboration and

distribution in near or real time with features unique to digital form: evanescence, timelessness,

instantaneous presence and disappearance and hidden, masked or counterfeit authorship. As a

functional theory the model is capable of handling such features. At each stage of the model’s

development, the political concerns of actors in their messaging roles is examined. How do

speakers control output despite mediation and competition? How do receivers assess their

sources for provenance and authority? Finally, the analytic model provides a template to better

adapt information extraction and data mining techniques (Konchady 2006; Manning, Raghavan

et al. 208; Manning and Schuetze 1999; Feldman and Sanger 2006) to subjects, actors and

systems in ways that are sensitive to the tradition of analytic specification of agents, systems and

issues in political science.

SECTION ONE: BUILDING THE ANALYTIC MODEL

CHAPTER 2: AN OVERVIEW OF BASIC COMMUNICATION – LOGIC AND

CONSTRAINT

Communication necessarily links at least two actors and one object, a message. A

communications network can be the expansion of a minimal paired link in both horizontal and

vertical direction. Vertical expansion implies an increasingly wider reach through the use of

amplification devices and intermediaries. These mediating elements can serve to increase

audience reach or penetration. Horizontal expansion is defined as the adoption of multiple

parallel channels; a given speaker employs a variety of carriers to reach his audience. The

audiences may overlap or be skew. In any political system, there are multiple networks. Some

may be formal and operate in plain sight, others secret. Hidden networks may be controlled by

both public and private entities as for example a spy network versus a samizdat resistance

network. In closed or authoritarian systems, formally acceptable political information is

controlled – that is, the public sphere or shareable space, is monitored.

Regardless of empirical manifestation and political type, all communications networks

operate with the same systemic principles. In this first section, building blocks are introduced

and discussed. Note that this project offers the following guidance – there are always two levels

of perspective, the system viewed from without and from within. If a map provides a snapshot,

the reality is that communication occurs in time and thus content flows are fluid as are the

relationships between active nodes. Whether viewed internally as an actor in a sequence or

externally, as a political observer studying actors and systems, the picture in question can change

due to the parallax of time. While a static snapshot improves insight into the detailed workings of

a system, because information flow occurs in different time slices and over different time

horizons, a theory of political communication must account for the impact of time.

Another operating premise is that the information environment is the sum of all the information

flows that exist in a political system. These flows may be formal and informal, long or short

lived. In a traditional approach that centers on the emanations and distributions of political

authorities and professional media organizations, short-term flows by individuals and small

organizations or those with limited audiences are often ignored, due in part to surmised

irrelevance or inadequate tools to measure. The barber shop, office water cooler, park corner, or

family dinner are imagined to be places of political expression and idea trade but these corners of

the world cannot be recorded and tracked in real time with actual transcripts. The move by

individuals to express themselves wherever they are, whenever they want changes things. People

now provide a voluminous record of informal self-reports. The top-heavy command structure

design of communication is now being balanced by a groundswell of citizen or private

expression. A robust theoretic model must be able to account for the emergence of sources and

their resultant flows.

To this end, this thesis does not begin with an overtly political logic – the problem of

communication is not defined on the basis of empirical types such as ruler, citizen, government,

law or state. Instead, it focuses on content production, or more specifically the issuance and

transmission of information, the flows that constitute streams which in turn are carried by agents

over channels to receivers. Political information concerns justice, distribution, allocation of value

and government, and the environment or public sphere is construed as a sociopolitical

phenomenon that is the collective expression of individuals who fulfill sociopolitical roles

according to their authority relations in a political system. Who says what to whom and how is

concretized as the flow of information into an idea asset base or knowledge space. The reach of

that space is a product of both the provider and the consumer or the one who would broadcast

and the one who would learn. Reach and effect can also be defined as a function of the

technological nature of the medium used. The information people generate embeds them in a

ideational locale with other people – concepts, habits and articulations also provide insight into

political character, outlook and preferences of speaker, handler and receiver. These data are not

just window-dressing; observation of public discourse reveals much about what a person is

willing and able to say to others. Public expression can influence and persuade. In the act of

expressing, a speaker instantiates a third-order dimension of ideas in information space that can

be pushed out or pulled down. To broadcast is to transmit, to learn is to retrieve. Thought to be

lost in the din of an impossibly large digital database, perhaps digital speech is not so

anonymous. In fact, with the right tools and approach, comments and commentary in the

blogosphere or Twitterverse may be traceable and mined for patterns that reveal something

useful about political practice.

A first move is to reprioritize political communication as a form of communication rather

than as a form of political action. Prioritizing the former means acknowledging the natural

constraints and features inherent in communication as an activity. This paper uses Shannon’s

sender-receiver paradigm (Shannon and Weaver 1998) as inspiration to rethink the nature of

human communication as an operation between various types of objects, agent, message,

channel, delivery, and receiver. It also defines the types of variables involved in order to provide

a terminology for communicative action that can be used across the sub-disciplines of political

communications scholarship, including agenda-setting, framing analysis, selective receptivity

and one and two step flow models.

To simplify the complexity that is the public sphere of discourse, the argument begins

with the most basic question. How does a speaker communicate with a receiver? Using notation,

a basic message is constructed and sent from author to receiver. What types of influences can the

channel impart on the message? How would changes to a message be evaluated and how might

one determine where the change occurs? Concepts such as noise, data corruption and

augmentation are introduced. Amplification and distortion are examined analytically as features

of a communications sequence. After introducing this basic model, the model is than expanded to

cover new variables that emerge with the introduction of multiple communication sequences.

Actors in a transmission sequence have certain capacities to generate, shape, and manipulate a

signal. For every output there is an intended input and every sender has a target. The reception

conditions under which individuals receive information are therefore vital to consider when

discussing the public sphere. Political communication can be deconstructed into a network of

information flows revealing the relations and locations of actors to events and to each other

across levels of authority and credibility. The various capacities and functional roles people play

along a communications sequence shapes the fundamental relationship between authors and

audience and conditions the data that flow between. The basic sequence is comprised of agents

and objects linked by their interchange relationships. More complex systems contain sequences

operating serially, with an initial sequence being re-transmitted to more agents who in turn may

add their own messages. Sequences may also occur in parallel, resulting in multiple streams

issuing from one or more speakers across one or more channels to limited or multiple receivers.

The actual flows, what people say, how they say it, how they treat what they receive and then

pass on can be construed as a pipeline of information from an origin to an end. The number of

actors involved in a transmission can grow or shrink from node to node, leading to differential

activation of a network akin to a signal that fans out in a wave that can be narrow or wide.

If communication is a puzzle, Figure 2.1 represents a simple model of a minimally complex

information environment replete with plural authors, intermediaries and consumers. In the

example, political objects have been assigned to the objects for reader familiarity. While

improving interpretation, the use of substantive labels obscures the functional constraints that

actually define the relationships between the nodes. After a brief discussion of the political object

map, the focus will quickly turn to the foundational communicative action orientation that

fundamentally shapes information distribution.

FIGURE 2.1 EXAMPLE COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK

An Example Communications Network Including Direct, Indirect and Cloud Contact

A complicated picture can be better interpreted by breaking it into component parts. The

example shows a network but it is not just a map. As important as the spatial relations between

types of nodes are the arrows that constitute the channels. Information flows between these

nodes. It is up to the analyst to determine 1) what sections of the network are active at any given

time for a speaker-receiver pair relative to a topic and time and 2) what data are exchanged when

the network is active. The goal of this project is to illuminate the dynamics of network exchange

as the collective communication choices of agents. Careful examination of the network in Figure

2.1 will reveal that the nodes may be related and they may stand in series or in parallel. There

can be a grouping of actors at each stage of a transmission as well as a clustering of sequences.

Event E

Politician R

Politician L Media Left

Media

Right

Media

Neutral

Citizen

1.1.2

Citizen

1.2

Citizen

2.1/3.1

Citizen

Citizen 1

Publicly Available

Distribution Server

Politician R2

Ideology

Each node represents a distinct functional category: from actor, such as politician, media, and

citizen, to transmitter, such as a media company of a political bent, to a recipient, such as the

citizen. The content that flows in these links is information – ideas held in documents such as

text, video, sound, image and combinations thereof. Note also that ideas can be injected into a

holding area, the sphere of ideas from which actors learn, ingest. Time matters with respect to

access and political relevance. When information streams cannot be preserved, their impact is

limited by time. When they can be recorded they retain mobilization potential. Activation and

spread of an idea requires means of distribution; the latter can facilitate the velocity and reach of

ideas and in certain form can promote knowledge by sheer repetition and immersion. The map

above serves as a template for exploring the nodes for the capacities to create or otherwise act on

messaging. Nodes are linked by directional arrows that demarcate the flow of information

between sender and receiver, author and consumer. In some instances multiple flows exist

between nodes and operate in both directions. These sectors imply an exchange rather than a feed

and nodes which have multi-directional channels have both send and receive capabilities.

The network mapping thus reflects a snapshot of static relations and a transit sequence of

dynamic flows. These together represent in graphic form a theory of political communication.

The political analyst can use the map to select an area to investigate. He might wish to determine

the choices available to actors regarding channels a speaker might use, speakers an intermediary

might relay or signals a receiver might tune to. He might also focus on the capacities of

transmitters – their amplification strength and frequency or on a linear sequence from speaker to

receiver. In contrast, a systems analyst might focus on global features – are there infrastructure

issues that affect communication and if so, for whom? Examined more closely, the links between

each node are actually conduits comprised of transmission and reception devices that vary in

their technology, signal effect, capacity, frequency and durability. For a given pairing in linear

sequence, the analyst can investigate the pipeline for technical characteristics such as conduit

count, agent involvement, and end-user reach as well as for the substantive content, political

issues and topics by certain demographics of agent handlers, that flows within each pipe. The

goal here is to encourage political researchers to analyze a new wrinkle in political

communication – public interactive expression or the massive discursive irruptions and

interventions in digital time-space. By explicating the potential of individuals as they are

embedded in a living discourse – one in which they participate as speaker, hearer, editor or all

three – the model points a way for researchers to begin to capture political behavior as it

happens, as statements that have public and real rather than surveyed and inferred sociopolitical

effect. This model of discursive activity is a template for monitoring the dynamic and static links

between productive and receptive points.

FIGURE 2.2 DISCOURSE FLOW BY ACTOR TYPE

The imposing map in Figure 2.1 can be deconstructed into component parts. Basic

sequences of communication tie the nodes together. The complex social model populates the

Political

Leader

Media

Company Citizen

Speaker Intermediary Receiver

Signal Flow Relay

Speaker Intermediary

Signal Flow Relay

Public

Sphere Receiver

Push or Pull

Information Delivery

map with their political function, politician, media company biased towards left, center or right,

and citizen. An analysis of their roles in a communications networks sets aside these labels in

favor of their functional role and relationships. People who start a message sequence are thus

speakers, they may or may not use intermediaries and they may reach end user receivers directly

or via the diffuse space of stored knowledge that is later downloaded by the recipient. The

functional guide also enables the political analyst to examine discrete message streams and

discover who is saying what about whom as a process of idea transmission that goes untouched

or heavily editorialized. This is a move to analyze productive expression – how do people shape

content and what does their involvement reveal about their politics? Similarly, this intuition can

be pursued on a system level. The analyst can search for patterns in the network – the

convergence of conduit and actor by issue area and time and the manner in which the pipeline

fires and spreads information – how, when and to whom. He can then begin to model

information flows as a form of wave propagation. In this way, the political information

environment is conceived as a traffic map of idea generation and conductance and nodes can

serve as catalyst or breakpoints in idea propagation. Finally, using such a model, the analyst can

begin to tackle the massive flows that are contained on the Internet. He can design a research

program that organizes empirical data – politicians, interest groups, corporations, activists,

topics and issues – and analyzes the communication streams that link them together and thus

provide insight into the manner in which political ideas circulate as a system, in a system.

To this end, the theory develops models at the actor level and the message level. The first

section describes the manner in which actors, those nodes which have agency, are related to each

other. The second section then delves into the mechanics of message construction and explores

how message units can be true or false or partly true and false and how they change due to noise,

distortion and corruption. The two levels are then combined and the analysis turns to exploring

the choices and implications of major types of communication streams – single and multi actor,

single and multi message. After developing these functional areas, the focus turns to analyzing

and discussing the political import of message sequence variations. The model provides a way to

rethink the choices available and constraints imposed on political communication.

CHAPTER 3: THE LINEAR SEQUENCE OF ACTORS – THE BUILDING

BLOCK OF A COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK

The simplest path is a line with a start and end point. It is the elaboration of intermediate

points as well as the concatenation of other parallel lines that results in the information

environment as a system of multiple interconnections with varying directionalities of flow

between nodes. In a perfect linear sequence, the end depends upon the beginning and the receiver

gets what the transmitter sends. In a more complex chain, the initial sequence may only be the

start of a multi-stop, multi-prong journey in which a message may be copied, split, augmented

such that multiple versions, each reflecting the accumulated handling of intermediaries, arrives at

various destinations. To understand the workings of a public sphere, one must therefore

appreciate the importance of the core component, the minimum set communication sequence.

In the following example, the core structure of communication is related by analogy.

Assume that two parties, Stephen and Rose, share a common language and there is no

mechanical impediment to communication. The two are in a quiet room with no other people,

have no distractions and all the time they need to converse. As Stephen articulates his message,

Rose processes and interprets the message contents based on what he says as well as how he says

it. She extracts the information from his signal. Unconstrained by physical, temporal or cognitive

constraint, the two should achieve clear intersubjective understanding. Transpose this

conversation to another environment or give either party mechanical issues – hearing loss,

stuttering, sleepiness for example, and they may not find common understanding. Indeed, the

quality of the link between these two nodes in the chain is contingent on both internal and

external capacities and elements. Environmental conditions might interfere and damage delivery

or comprehension. If instead the conversation is held on an airport tarmac, ambient noise may

overwhelm, requiring Stephen and Rose to shout or repeat themselves. In such instances they

might need to shout louder or, in technical terms to amplify their signal. If they speak in the a

crowded subway station, the speech of other parties shouting across may distort or corrupt what

each person hears. Rose is forced to parse Stephen’s speech from many others and find a way to

lock onto his message while ignoring others. She must separate a good signal from the noise and

hope that she did not mishear him and distort his message. Finally, in the last example, after the

two have parted, Stephen realizes he has to tell Rose something just as he enters a closed-door

meeting. Given the importance of time and his unavailability, Stephen entrusts his assistant

Irving to convey his message. The success or failure of Stephen’s communication with Rose in

this instance depends on Irving’s attentiveness, comprehension, ability to relay what he has been

told and his motive to ender the message faithfully or not. This scenario introduces a number of

key elements – the speaker who sends a message, the hearer who receives it and the intermediary,

who handles it faithfully, maliciously or negligently. Given the importance of the message,

Stephen decides to call Rose to verify the transmission. He thus monitors the situation and gets

direct feedback from Rose and is able to determine content delivery and by implication, Irving’s

performance as a conduit.

The next step is to translate this practical example into formal terms. A communication

attempt commences with the initiation of a transmission. Prior to the action “send,” one must

draft a message. Before this there is intent – the motive to express necessarily combined with an

idea of the audience and a hoped for effect. At each stage there are choices that affect the

breadth, depth, speed and quality of delivery as well as the connection between the speaker and

the audience demographic. After drafting a message it is prepared for distribution. In the formula

the notation S, for Sender is used although at times the term author is also employed

interchangeably. The message object is assumed to be discrete – it can be packaged or, in

Shannon’s terms, encoded. The message might be a handwritten memo, an email, video

recording, photograph, a sound track or an utterance by a person in real time.

Since message transit may be direct and immediate or mediated and shifted in time, the

analytic model is designed to account for the impact of time, including duration, latency and

frequency. Flow occurs through some Channel C which may or may not be hosted by an agent,

an Intermediary I. Examples of channels include the physical-tangible such as the newspaper,

digital or analog waveform transmissive, such as over the air radio or digital byte and

distribution protocol, for instance, an Internet website posting or Twitter tweet. A recipient,

Receiver R stands at the end of a communication and closes the sequence. A minimum

communication set thus includes two actors, Sender S and Receiver R, an object, Message M and

a conduit, Channel C. More complex sequences may include the intermediary I or multiple actors

producing multiple messages, employing multifold channels to reach multiple targets. The

example using Stephen and Rose illustrates a face-to-face interaction where only one person

speaks. This basic sequence capturing a minimum link between nodes is formally written as

follows:

3.1 S M R

Conversation also implies bidirectional interlocution, which is captured by the use of arrows in

each direction:

S j R

3.2 and 3.3 S D R

Arrow direction indicates the flow of information, who is transmitting to whom. The size

of the arrows, as shown in figure 3.2 denotes an asymmetric relationship. The larger arrow can,

for example, indicate greater authority of volumetric output. Equal sized arrows in example 3.3

indicate communication parity. The use of such signage enables the political analyst to succinctly

capture the relationship between pairs and allows for quick analysis with a glance. The

analytic framework is a way to analyze empirical manifestations in a coherent manner. Different

systems may have different types of actors with a variety of capabilities. What factors can affect

the basic direct, limited element message sequence? External considerations with respect to

geography, language, technology, political structure, culture or resources may shape political

communications for particular actors or for whole systems. One such instance is when

communication is interrupted by scale due to distance or audience size. When face to face

communication is not possible, one might resort to mediated communication. In the conventional

example, the speaker who addresses the physically far removed receiver may hand write a letter

and mail it. This communication would be handed off to a courier and barring courier

malefaction, the link would be direct, albeit time lagged, once delivered.

In a mediated version, the speaker might commit his message to the memory of an intermediary

such as Irving in the earlier example. Distal communication is a matter of location and time,

mediated communication is a question of transmission. There are times when the two features

may converge but the specific qualities remain distinct.

What if the political leader seeks to address a nation that covers two time zones? For such

a task, he would need help – either an army of messengers or some other means to reach out to

all his citizens. In formal terms, the technical action used to expand his voice is defined as

amplification. Whenever there is amplification there is the interjection of either a device or an

intermediary which in turn creates a transition point. In both instances, the variable may change

the input message or signal. In the case of a device, technical expertise is needed to ensure that

input to output, the signal does not change. If an intermediary is employed, the transition point is

also a transfer point, where the Sender S hands off his message to Intermediary I. Figure 3.4

defines this sequence:

3.4 S M I MMSI R

For the sender and receiver, the goal is for the Intermediary to do no harm. Fidelity is

defined as content integrity after completing a transmission stage. Quality of message handling is

a continuum from perfect from bit for bit transmission to diminished conveyance and even

incomplete communication. There is an ideal range for the speaker for communication versus

resource allocation. The minimum is that the message reaches its target intact. Under perfect

reproduction, the intermediary is transparent and imparts zero effect and countless transparent

intermediaries can be interposed between a sender and receiver without issue.

The formal notation for perfect fidelity, which is when the relayed copy MI is identical to

the original, MS for Sender S and Intermediary I is defined in figure 3.5:

3.5 MI/MS = 1 ` MI = MS3.5

If the message has been augmented, the result will be greater than one and if abridged, it

will be less than one. Message alteration can occur for a variety of reasons, including careless,

negligent or deliberate mishandling. Not all changes, however result from direct manipulation of

the content. Fidelity is defined as data integrity in reproduction, where an original message is

neither corrupted nor transformed by transmission. A perfect intermediary is a pure extension of

the sender. An agent’s capacity to transmit is intertwined with his capacity of carriage – what

resources can he recruit to convey, transmit, broadcast, or otherwise reproduce his missive? The

further away the audience is from the sender, the more important carriage becomes. The criteria

for successful completion of the communications sequence include a minimum set of conditions:

the receiver must have access to the output of the Channel C used by Sender S. If there is too

much noise present in a channel, would-be receivers may tune the signal out and miss any and all

messaging attempts. For this reason, senders care about link quality for their messages and

intermediaries care about link quality as they wish to retain suppliers and consumers. Here one

can see the importance of all the nodes in a sequence. Conditions at origin, in transit and at

pipeline output, are variables which an author and intermediary can directly or indirectly

manage. With perfect transmission the data that are received matches the source, bit for bit,

element for element. In this scenario, Channel C is transparent, the intermediary is flawless and

the communication system achieves absolute fidelity. On the other hand, change may occur to a

message during transit. What are the substantive changes and the causes of deviation? Departures

from an original content state can be categorized error, distortion, or noise. The concept of

handling effect speaks to a new focus for the political communications analyst. Simplified

models of communications systems are either silent on the pipeline effect or focus solely on

message creation and absorption. The manner in which messages pass through networks and the

conditions under which they present themselves for reception has received little to no attention.

In reality, channels are not perfect, they may tend to drop data or add it. How and why changes

arise is a question for those involved in the communication as well as for political scholars. In

order to organize research, one must categorize the major types of changes. In the model,

changed conditions can be described as noise or distortion. Generally, the cause of noise is

spurious and non-deliberate while distortion is the result of intervention. Both concepts will be

elucidated shortly.

PART 2: MESSAGE LEVEL ANALYSIS: ELEMENT AND TOKEN REPRESENTATIONS

IN MESSAGE CONSTRUCTION

Language not only describes but also illuminates and conveys understanding to those

who are not present to witness. In an ideal world, the use of facts should not be controversial. In

politics, when power is a zero sum game and competitors vie for office, ulterior motives may

influence agents to intervene in the communications sequence. Some speakers may pursue a

strategy of fact-avoidance trivialization, topic shifting or politicization. How this might occur can

be tracked with a combination of content analysis over time across participant. To accomplish

this, one must understand that the crafting of messages is a process that intertwines facts in the

world with existing political philosophies that provide context and implication. This is explained

below.

The earlier example of an Event E with elements ABC can be deconstructed into granular

constituent elements. Meaning is conveyed by strings of data, often text but also in-line

attachments such as audio or video recordings and images. This analytic framework focuses on

text examples. For an Event E, the use of A and B as descriptors is more accurately, the selection

of tokens from the Set A and B that apply to the event. Lowercase is used to denote the tokens of

a set. Thus the exploded view of the Message M describing Event E is actually:

M = a1 + a2 + b1 +

b2 an !"A,

3.6 bn !"B,

A simple political message could contain just one word: War! Victory! Dewey! One word

messages can and do occur, often as imperatives but to have political weight they likely require a

peroration. The above examples may make sense to the political savant who can supply the likely

context but even then, one might adduce the wrong context and political point. The use of

additional elements, tokens, expands on a tentative or essence of an idea and augments it with

defining characteristics that invest actual substance and particular political meaning. Thus,

messages must have a minimal sequence, whether provided in the original container or bracketed

by inference. Context is the skeletal framework that enables intersubjective understanding. An

author may craft a message that is intelligible only to him. Wittgenstein’s “Slab!” elaborates this

point: to the person external to the scene, the appropriate semantic reference is obscure. So it is

with political terms, many of which are powerful, evocative, yet open-ended as to critical

defining termination. By adding a single significant element, context can be implemented. War

with Iraq. Victory over Japan. Dewey wins!

The next elaboration takes the message from single to multiple objects and locates the

universe of plausible elements for drafting a message in a predefined space. Speaker S creates

Message M reporting on Event E using b elements drawn from the Set B. More elaborate

examples with elements CDE would follow the same design. The analysis proceeds on two

prongs. As a report, the message would be examined for accuracy and the activation of the

delivery network – is the message transparent, truthful and communicated to all relevant

stakeholders in a timely fashion? As a political action, the message may also provide insight and

authoritative analysis declaiming the reason for the event and its implications. Can the analyst

discern the political context and reasoning that is ascribed to the event? Are particular actors are

assigned culpability for failure and responsibility for success? The choice of variables used in

drafting a message hinges on the intersection between reportage and political engineering. In

terms of honest messaging, the choice of variables a and b is neither infinite nor unconstrained –

details must derive from the source material. In this variant, elements A and B constitute two

distinct sets of facts that collide with the event. One example might be Al Qaeda and Islamic

Fundamentalism for 9/11. In general, if Message M is a combination of A and B, the analyst

should then determine how the sets relate to each other and to the event? If A and B share some

common tokens, they would intersect as depicted in figure 3.7:

FIGURE 3.7 POTENTIAL UNIVERSE OF ELEMENTS FROM WHICH TO CREATE

MESSAGE M

An accurate message must contain both A and B. Things are usually not so simple and

there may be multiple issues that collide, some of which intersect, others of which are skew.

Figure 3.8 depicts an event where an element C is also present but not related to A or B:

FIGURE 3.8 UNIVERSE OF OVERLAPPING ELEMENTS

As before, a truthful account will contain A, B, AB and C. The political maneuvering

emerges when one attempts to engineer a message that is more selective in its rendering. If a

BA A+B

Element Sets A, B and Intersection of A+B

BA A+B

Multiple Possible Sets to Apply to Message

speaker covers only A and B in his message, will the report make sense – does it meet a

minimum semantic base? If C is ignored, is it because it is insignificant or did a political decision

drive the deletion? With this example, one encounters the concept of filtration. Discussion of the

particular manifestation – windowing or framing – will be covered shortly.

To understand this more clearly, it is important to explain how elements are used to create

messages. In choosing to draft a message about something concrete or in the world, an author

must make choices. Motivated by some political agenda, one can expect the messaging to reflect

certain positions and priorities. For example, an event might occur that various bystanders

witness. If significant, the political authority will provide an assessment and report to the public.

For the eyewitness there is a minimum set of facts that the official report must contain if the story

is to be regarded as true. In general, one assumes that direct knowledge always acts as a check on

narrative imagination since the citizen will evaluate what she receives against what she knows.

The inclusion and exclusion of certain objects speaks not only to the most appropriate

narrative as driven by the event but also the internal preferences and discursive propensities of

the author. Where the author will set the boundary between truth and lies depends on his

calculating the odds that his audience has alternate, independent or competing reports that

disconfirm or refute his report. Message creation is thus a dynamic balancing process between

articulating one’s goals against what others are saying and anticipating what the public demands

or desires to hear. Using this methodology, the analyst is then equipped to deconstruct the

functionality of biased messaging, including statement, coverage and gatekeeping bias. For this

reason, the analyst must focus on content and actor for their behavior as well as the message

stream and its start and end linkages.

Political speakers start with the raw materials that constitute political events and

phenomena and build a narrative based on personal philosophies, frames and ideologies that

help him to shape and define his positions in a given sociopolitical discourse for a given time

frame.

Politics is a practice of expedience and the horizon is short – yesterday and the immediate future.

Within these constraints, the political author produces his message as a combination of events

and facts coupled with interpretation and opinion. As a political speaker, some theme should

weave through his messaging - this is what differentiates political communication from academic

observation or journalistic reportage. The characteristics of a liberal or conservative, Democrat or

Republican are found in the meta-narrative of speech and action that has transpired before under

the same markers. Thus, when a political actor speaks, he begins by operating within the bounds

of expectation and his transmission is received with an attached prior reputation. Reputation

serves a purpose for readers, too as anticipation of past experience can enable the reader to

manage noise, distortion or data corruption by discerning the characteristic logic and habitual

arguments of the sender-topic-channel combination. Beyond this, potential recipients may

categorize their sources in advance and judge content not by the data but by the sender. Knowing

or believing is a step to pre-judging and individuals may begin with a hostile attitude towards

certain intermediaries (Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken 1994; Gunther and Chia 1999; Coe and

Tewksbury 2008; Huge and Glynn 2010). When drafting a message, recall that the author is

mindful of his audience. Every sequence has a recipient, every signal a target. A political speaker

is thus sensitive to the interest people have in and event and the basis for his message is part duty

and part opportunism.

Effective political communication is a combination of technical mastery and artful

subtlety. One must have both means and expertise. It is how one navigates interest groups,

constituencies, political obligation, competitors and agendas that determines the measure of a

political communication strategy. One politician may wish to convey his message bluntly while

another may prefer oblique subtlety. The manner in which messages reflect manipulation and

truth speak are therefore an important consideration of a communications theory. Objects

embedded into a message possess the capacity to state what is obvious but they also may contain

allusions to other concepts that stand just outside the published frame. Political speakers do not

only deal with concrete facts – they work the angles of a political issue and seek to mobilize

pertinent interest groups by sparking their interest and imagination. The contextualization of an

event is a vital component of political messaging. Skilled communicators may employ a

multilevel narrative - what is said is meant to mean different things to different people. For those

who are not familiar with the trajectory of a speaker’s political orientation, a message may be

taken at face value only while those who have the cipher may be able to extract an underlying

message. In competitive electoral politics it is necessary to compartmentalize and limit ones risk

by segmenting one’s talking points according to who might be listening.

Speech machinations work because a message unit is not simply a collection of icons but

of bits of data – some are self-explanatory while others require elucidation. In a text based

message, the author relies on a carefully crafted sequence of words. Assuming that meaning is

derived from prior convention (Wittgenstein 2003) and syntax (Chomsky 1957), the deployment

and structure of the message can evoke intersubjective understanding based on an overlapping

political knowledge base between sender and receiver. Words are tokens of types, where types

refer to the kind of word-object used. Words as tokens represent certain kinds of objects that

convey some meaning. It is the intersubjective understanding and acceptance of semantic

references that enable words to hold their meaning across usage, as long as that usage falls within

an acceptable range. An author will distribute and tailor his message according to the audience

and the best means possible. As a result, he may produce different versions with different levels

of media richness aimed at the combined mix of capability and demographic a channel may

provide. Oftentimes, political speech exposure is limited due to programming, cost, or viewer

attention and messages may be delivered only partially. Persuasion depends on the ability of the

speaker-transmission chain to provide enough guidance for meaning reconstruction in the way

the speaker intended. To this point, the analysis has centered on simplified variables but in order

to explicate the mechanics of messaging as a function of selected elements conjoined, it is

necessary to delve deeper into the granular factors of production.

Here one must differentiate between an author and a speaker. The act of creating a

message defines authorship. The act of broadcasting it, transmitting it or otherwise articulating

defines speaking. In many cases, it is easier to combine the two into one and ignore the

possibility of proxy speakers relying on ghost authors. For politics, what matters is responsibility

and whoever is accountable for a message is considered the pertinent party. In more complex

constructs, it is possible to model authors and speakers separately, such that the two actors have a

relationship that can be analyzed particularly in cases where there is disagreement and an attempt

to take credit or assign blame. Thus one encounters the phenomenon of “being misquoted” or

speaking in good faith but with bad information due to an unreliable source. Assuming that the

speaker drafts his own messages, there are different possibilities to consider when he first thinks

to convey a message. He may rely on past experience to guide him in his attempt to strike a

balance between an objective and honest report and a message that is helpful to his cause

politically.

The following steps through one possible logic. For an Event E characterized by the

elements ABC, the speaker may weight his narrative based on a combination of prioritizing his

own political agenda, accounting for the targeted audience’s likely response and tracking the

messaging his political competitors are producing. Although Figures 3.12 and 3.13 describe a

limited 3 element source, the choice of A, B, C or any combination is a political decision with

consequences for ensuing discourse and knowledge acquisition. For any political message there

is a reason the author chose those elements at that time and place. Other actors may produce

their own variants and when aggregated, the full information environment reflects these multiple

channels streaming multiple narratives, some clashing, others overlapping.

Given that communication is about a message and a common understanding, the political

analyst should keep in mind the fact that a message is relevant to the extent that it is heard and

accepted – to convince speaks to an argument’s prowess and to be convincing speaks to its

relevance and positioning to a sympathetic ear. Thus, a political message is constructed around

issues but targeted towards sympathetic listeners.

PART 3: MOTIVES BEHIND PARTICULAR MESSAGES: A NOTE ON AUTHORSHIP

AND POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Political speakers are differentiated by the planks in their ostensible platform and they

should be evaluated based on what they articulate. Speech is one way in which politicians

concretize their putative political ideology. Given this, the analyst can begin the investigation by

controlling for the political lens that underlies a speaker’s political communications. Construed

as a generative process of seeing and commenting on things in the world, the optics one uses –

possibly defined as comprehensive doctrine, ideology, or worldview – enables and constrains.

Optics shape a speaker’s awareness: for any and all events E, a speaker’s ideology extracts

relevant points while disregarding the rest – what he sees is a pure function of his framework.

For adversaries with antithetical ideologies, the same event ABCDU is therefore viewed

differently and thus, they generate completely different messages. This scenario is shown

graphically in figure 3.9. For event E, with possible elements ABCDU, Politician X’s ideology

will cause him to only see A and B. This would be denoted as xAB. In contrast, an opponent with

ideology Y will produce the contrasting message, yCD. To some extent this phenomenon and the

one described below cover the notions of coverage and gatekeeping bias, with the added nuance

that such biases can be automatic, as in the case of blind ideology, or deliberate as in the case of

political posturing.

FIGURE 3.9 IDEOLOGY AND PERSPECTIVE

Ideological Point of View Determines Objects Perceived in Field of View

Message =

xAB

Message =

yCD

Y POV

X POV

A less strong form argument would hold that people do not have total blinders but instead

a colored lens. In this view, frameworks do not define consciousness but selectivity. For a given

Event E person with ideology X will focus on elements AB as pivotal while a person with

ideology Y will focus on elements CD. Both parties, however, acknowledge the event as ABCD.

In the latter example, the message production is noted as ABx and CDy where the political

qualifier follows rather than defines the element stream. These two processes, termed windowing

and framing, will be examined in greater depth shortly.

Finally, events cannot always be reduced to simplistic causes and explained away by

preset narratives. Not all things fall neatly into doctrines, dogma or ideology. Such elements have

unknown fit – and their relevance to political actors and citizens will have to play out. In Figure

3.9 this unknown is defined as element U. It lies outside of the optics of both x and y ideologies.

As a general rule, there exist issues, events and policies in the world that are open to analysis,

interpretation and capture. These issues may be crosscutting and may determine the balance of

power between political competitors. Cast in another light, if xAB and yCD define polarization,

element U defines the space that cannot be attached to a pole. As the model is scaled to multiple

actors, message streams, and audiences against a timeline, it will become clear that events,

analyses and the roles and responsibility of different actors provide a platform for change in

messaging over time and for new speakers and editors to enter the discussion to speak to missed,

omitted or disputed features of an ongoing debate.

CHAPTER 4: EVALUATING CHANGES TO MESSAGE UNITS

PART 1: THE DEFINITION OF NOISE AND ITS EFFECT ON COMMUNICATION

The construction of a message comprised of whatever elements have been selected now

enters the distribution phase. Any message that is transmitted is open to change. As a given

Message M moves through a communications system artifacts may become attached to the

message. This is defined as noise. Noise is measured as an amplitude ratio of original signal to

noise elements. Figure 4.1 describes the process of noise addition during transmission.

Recall that perfect transmission implies an identity relation between sent and received object:

M before Channel C equals Message M after Channel C. When Sender S uses some Channel C

to transmit his message M, by the time it arrives at Receiver R, it has changed to

become M+N.

4.1 SMCM+N R

This can be exploded to examine the process in greater detail. For Message M containing

two elements, A+B, if Channel C adds noise, then the message stream becomes A+B+N:

Channel C

4.2 A + B U A + B + N

Since messages are comprised of strings of sub-elements that can include, text, video,

sound and image, the insertion of new symbols or data can be overlaid on or embedded into this

string as shown in figure 4.3:

N = n 1+ n2 + n3 +,...nn

if M = A + B and N = n 1+ n2

4.3 then M + N = A + B + n 1+ n2

Channel C has injected two noise elements, n1+n2 and the message has increased in size

from two elements A+B, to four elements, A+B+n1+n2.

What are the consequences for the sender and the receiver? Do they communicate and if

so, what is shared? The first reading is that noise and signal are equally weighted and the odds

are even that the message is interpreted properly. If there were three ore more noise elements, the

signal would need to be retrieved from the dreck. It is clear that noise damages communication

by drowning out the original. For the speaker, noise can damage credibility if his messaging

appears to be defective, flawed or even wrong. Uncertain reception implies risk and the speaker

cannot build on his narrative if the message blocks are compromised.

Even if noise can be filtered, it remains problematic as it incurs resource costs in terms of

processing power – to filter and interpret by the receiver and to monitor and fix by the speaker.

These processes take time and demand attention that receivers may not wish to spare. The

likelihood of communication success also depends on how often the sender-receiver pair

communicate. Signal power is tied to signal frequency as defined by iterations of signal lock.

How often does a speaker broadcast, how often does the receiver seek to receive the speaker’s

signal and how often do they actually accomplish interchange. To use a concrete example, how

often does the President give some speech X and does the receiver actually view it? If he only

gives it once, failure to view the signal means failure to communicate. If the message is full of

noise – his speech cannot be heard due to problems with the sound – despite signal lock,

communication still falters. If the speech is given over and over and the receiver tunes in to build

his comprehension, the essential message may ultimately be received.

Analytically, message duration and frequency of transmission affect the impact of noise.

There are solutions to noise. The speaker can transmit continuously – by keeping a signal live or

hot, the sender creates the opportunity for the receiver to tune in until she can comprehend the

message. He might also switch or add intermediaries and carrier channels so his signal is spread

out across channels. The receiver can thus tune into the same channel if the signal is repeated or

scan across channels and aggregate, assuming noise levels differ by amplitude and type across

those channels.

Another solution is to monitor reception conditions. By comparing input with output the

speaker can take steps to improve things, either by crafting of his message more carefully or by

managing his pipeline with greater diligence. Despite the efforts by the transmitter, failure may

also arise if the recipient does not realize her information feed is dysfunctional. A savvy receiver

must be willing to actively search and compare news over time and across sources in order to

confirm what she learns.

PART 2: DEFINING DATA CORRUPTION AND DISTORTION: THEIR IMPACT ON

COMMUNICATION

Compared to noise, data corruption and distortion pose a much greater threat to viable

communication because they change the essence of the message. Distortion is defined as a

change to the elements that comprise a message and can include transformation, deletion or

augmentation. In the absence of before and after comparisons, data corruption may be difficult to

discern. Corruption applies to the condition of actual element. Corrupted elements are those

which are inverted, reversed or otherwise transformed. Distortion applies to the message as a unit

and accounts for corruption as well as the addition of new and deletion of existing elements or

any combination of the three mentioned features. Distortion holds numerous negative

consequences for sender and receiver since it not only impairs but subverts intersubjective

understanding in ways that the speaker and hearer may not realize. When both sender and

receiver are apprised of an intermediary, they may expect some level of message change. How

much change and with what effect may not be known at first. For the speaker, the path a message

travels can be planned for but its actual passage is subject to the fidelity, diversion and

modification of bridging transmitters. Similarly, the receiver can know where she picked up her

news – the last stage prior to her receipt – but may not know the whole circuit either. More than

one intermediary may be involved and each node’s distortion may accrete. As a result, the field

of political information can exhibit the recycling of news and arguments and the reversal and

counter-argument of news and posturing.

The following formulas describe three types of distortion: corruption, addition and

subtraction.

Message M may be transmitted from Sender S to Receiver R in the form M=a+b+c. The

Intermediary I may be contracted by S to amplify or he may have inserted himself into a

message’s path and changed its contents.

Variables c and d follow the progression of elements a and b to indicate that they are of

the same type. Their notation in lowercase distinguishes them as distortion components. Now

that the message has changed, the next step is to determine why and how. Figure 4.4 describes

and additive distortion. Facts, analysis or other seeming relevant objects are injected into an

original message. Below, the Intermediary has added elements c and d and the message received

by R is qualitatively different.

4.4 Sa+b+c Ia+b+ +c d R

An intermediary may also revise a message by deleting elements, where the original a+b

becomes only a or only b. Or he may combine deletion and addition as shown in Figure 4.5:

4.5 Sa+b+c Ic+d+e R

In this example, the mediator has not only abridged the original but attached his own

elements such that two of three elements now project his version of the message. In political

discussion, this may manifest itself as selectively focusing on aspects of a message, shortening

its original content and adding new analysis and context. Opposition parties may often use the

speech of an opponent as a point of departure to fill in the blanks or draw conclusions in ways

that excoriate the speaker and valorize the critic.

A more disruptive tactic would be to invert the arguments of a missive. When corrupted a

message element could mean the opposite or a secondary political meaning could be overlaid.

The use of the apostrophe in Figure 4.6 denotes a different state of a given element, a becomes

a’, b becomes b’ after corruption. Given the many shadings that can be inferred from political

posturing, the mediator can turn positives into negatives and thus change the tenor and inflection

of a message.

4.6 Sa+b+c Ia'+b'+c R

Combinations of corruption, deletion and augmentation speak to political expression as a

form of editing, contextualization, and ad hoc analysis that can twist an essential message, limit

its persuasive power, appear wrongheaded, out of context or specious. Defined as a change in the

elements of a message, distortion levels that exceed some threshold will damage communication.

This threshold varies by speaker, channel, message, frequency, amplification strength and

breadth and prior topical messaging history. Damage can be evaluated from the viewpoint of

both sender and receiver and interference can be evaluated as deliberate or accidental. The

magnitude of the phenomenon can be viewed from both ends of the pipeline. Given an altered

message, where AB becomes A’ B’, and C a reader may wrongly infer the facts and implications

of the reported event. To the extent that she accepts what she is told, the intermediary exerts

undue political influence over her political knowledge and potential for evaluation.

By applying the concepts of noise and distortion developed here, the analyst can stratify

and categorize expressive behavior by incremental effect and determine the location, magnitude

and directionality of such changes. In so doing, he may be able to draw attention to nodes in a

distribution scheme for their characteristic behavior and thus provide evidence for systemic bias.

Concepts of patterned change captured by statement bias can be evaluated as an input-output

flow dynamic. This extends the notion of statement bias – it is not only that an independent

account provides a preferential report but the intermediary intervenes into someone else’s stream

and tailors it to his own purpose.

From a mechanics standpoint, noise and distortion demand different solutions. As a

problem of transmission, noise requires resolution of reception issues - how well does a signal

penetrate the scree? As a problem of meaning and the attempt to connect inter-subjectively,

distortion involves audience understanding and implicates a universe of referential materials –

political philosophy, comprehensive doctrine, history, the law among other things. It is one thing

to deny communication, for example, when noise obscures a message and another thing to

reorient, exaggerate, trivialize or invert a message. From a methodology standpoint, ideal type

cases exist as a way of pushing the analyst to move past content analysis that focuses solely on a

semantic changed states – the substantive content of bias as it occurs and to the components that

are the clues behind that bias – and into research on the mechanics of that change. By specifying

types of distortion, this approach asks the analyst to explore the ways in which agents express

their intervention and to develop the tools need to measure such behavior.

PART 3: AUTHORS DRAFT AND SPEAKERS TRANSMIT BUT DO INTERMEDIARIES

CONVEY? THE SIDE-EFFECTS OF AMPLIFICATION

As a matter of command and control, change to an original message implies a new stream

or streams that emanates from an intermediary. The fact that change exists begs further

investigation. Why should an intermediary interrupt and intervene? The following sections

address this problem and its manifestation in network flows.

The constitution of a political message may be uncontroversial but the nature of politics

is such that basic facts and their associated reports are often contested. Thus, actors may

intervene in messaging streams to modify them for their own purposes. The basic elements of the

analytic model cover the simple linear sequence and the drafting of a message about Event E

from a short list of elements ABCDU. Expanding on the logic, when there is a diversity in

political interests, there may be a rush to meet the demand and political issues can generate

hyper-variegated messaging streams. If one person produces a message AB, others may fill in

what the first has omitted and transmit BC, AC, A, B, or C. For any given topic, the multitude of

variants may speak to different constituencies, ideologies or political opportunity. Given that

competing politicians battle over issues and votes, it should not be surprising to see messages

diverging on facts and ramifications for the same event. From Event E, one thus finds two

distinct but similar message possibilities:

4.7 a1+ + +a2 b1 b versusa21 + + +b1 c1 c2

Note that the distribution of variables a, b and c indicate overlap for a1 and b1 and

divergence, where b2, c1 and c2 are not shared. To indicate semantic significance, multiple

tokens of the same type, for example a1, a2 or b1, b2, indicate greater relative weighting of that

element. Barring direct knowledge of the source for these messages it would be difficult to

determine which version is more accurate or if either one is accurate at all. Moreover, while a

zero sum political perspective would hold that only one version can be true, the shadings that

characterize actual political communications can potentially and properly result in conflicting

evaluations and their resultant messages.

In the monolithic, top-down political elite mass communications conception, few people

have the opportunity to command an audience and initiate a message sequence but many may

have the opportunity to intervene in a given messaging stream. Distortion and corruption reflect

such intervention. Whereas an original message reflects original the points and emphases of the

author, a relayed message may have new emphases and abridged excerpts. In the following

example, M1 serves as the message given to an Intermediary. M2, M3 and M4 depict three

different kinds of deleterious outcomes after transit.

M1 = + +a1 a2 b1

M2 = + + +a1 b1 b2 b3

M3 = +a1 b1

4.8 M4 =a1

If all three variables in the original message are of equal importance, gain or loss can be

calculated as a proportional change. In the original message, element a is weighted 2:1. In

version M2, there is dramatic tilt with b favored in a 3:1 ratio. In variant M3 a2 has been deleted

and in variant M4 only a1 is transmitted. In all cases, the message has changed dramatically and

the intermediary has not been transparent. For the speaker, receiver and the communications

analyst, the abiding concern is that the original intent is conveyed. Under which variant might

this hold true? M3 and M4 are the best, albeit poor candidates. In M3, the intermediary has

diminished the importance of a and in M4, the information is a partial truth – a1 is a valid if

markedly incomplete account. In contrast, the intermediary has shifted the message content in

M2 to cover non-original elements b2 and b3 and shade the message in the opposite direction.

The question is what effect this has on communication. If the original essence is damaged or

contradicted, how so and what does it say about the interloper?

If this transmission is a single burst or iteration, the impact of interference is exacerbated.

Imagine that the speaker sends message M1 and four different receivers each receive one of M1

through M4. The result would have numerous implications for political knowledge. All four

receivers will have different sets of basic facts and thus they may disagree on fundamental issues.

The speaker will have appeared to have said different things to different people and without a

monitoring system, he may not realize this, which can cause problems in speech consistency and

overall credibility in future communications. If the four receivers share what they have been told,

their perception of both the truth and the truthfulness of the speaker may be affected negatively.

One solution would be to split messaging concerning Event E into chunks with each burst

focusing on select elements. This will limit the latitude for omission or modification as message

subjects will be simple and coherent. The trade is an increase in needed bandwidth and the

admission that a complete communication will require the successful transmission of a sequence

of messages.

Distortion events signal a qualitative transformation in the capacity of nodes on a

network. A public sphere is founded on the ability of downstream nodes to intervene and express

themselves, too. The Internet, information age version takes this further and anticipates the

possibility of citizens becoming original authors who transmit to large, non-public sub-networks.

When intermediaries and receivers also have sender and author capabilities, the communications

network expands geometrically. There remain some steps to cover before analyzing the full scale

communications model. Multiple message streams by one or more authors and multiple streams

by multiple authors are the next building blocks to be discussed.

PART 4: QUALITY ASSURANCE AND THE MONITORING OF COMMUNICATIONS

Given the potential for communication mishap, it is in the interest of a political elite to

install a command and control system to ensure the quality of his message transmission. Control

over the entrance of subjects into public circulation limit the risk of non-competence or failure to

meet expectations about issues one has not prepared for. By limiting the horizon of topics,

established authority can promote an agenda that favors the status quo. When a speaker contracts

an intermediary, he may have an expectation of the service to be rendered – what audience will

be reached, via what method, how often and for how long. He will also demand that his original

message is not modified, put into improper context or placed alongside signals that compete,

demean, or diminish his missive. To this end, the political speaker may wish to monitor outgoing

transmissions. One method is to measure actual output as it occurs downstream either at the exit

from amplification or after reception by an end user. There are many possible variants of

monitoring and authentication; one system may be designed to catch error in expression such as

deviation, editing, abridgment or distortion while another system may measure message

absorption by surveying a target audience. Regardless of approach, a monitoring system is built

to meet three criteria: timeliness, accuracy and context. It is up to the speaker to weigh his needs

against his resources to determine where to implement his feedback loop since each loop can

only cover a portion of the transmission network and the cost of installation may preclude

multiple loops across channels over time.

There are two basic locations for feedback and each measures different nodes. The choice

of method depends on the channel and intermediary as well as the audience. Technology and

timing are important factors to consider when designing a system. The first addresses the direct

relationship between sender and intermediary. The political leader can manage his outbound

supply-chain. Oriented to this end, a supply feedback loop is designed to examine defects in

output – what went wrong such that intermediaries distort a signal. He might, for example,

monitor the output of various news pipelines in real time to gauge the accuracy of their delivery.

Thus he would view the broadcast as they occur and put himself in the place of the viewer at

reception. This loop tests the direct link but does not gauge effect. Its advantage is that it can be

automated- the speaker can record a feed and evaluate its fidelity post-hoc.

The task of a monitoring station inserted at a channel’s output is to confirm minimal

message interference. This placement also serves as a verification device in a dance of trust-

butverify that plays out between high profile speakers and observers, critics and interest groups

who may have their own agendas. Indeed, monitoring becomes more critical when the author’s

reputation, authority or credibility are at stake. Deleterious messaging often incurs wrath upon

the speaker rather than the messenger and political authors in particular have much to lose if the

medium distorts the message. Feedback control enables the sender to apprehend signal deviations

prior to mass distribution and shortens the window to halt altogether or modify prior to further

dissemination.

A second option, polling respondents to report what they know and how they know it,

measures absorption at the cost of sampling generality and time lag. Surveys can only be done so

often and the need to generalize across samples limits the granularity of actual information feeds

to batteries of higher level, topic type questions. In a feedback loop the sender inserts a

monitoring device into the simple sequence S-I-R which results in Sender-IntermediaryFeedback

Loop-Receiver (S-I-FBS-R) where the Sender receives the Intermediary’s output in real time.

For the speaker who worries more about response effect, monitoring might be positioned

after reception. This is the location of the public opinion survey of the media. In this design, the

sender evaluates message absorption and in order to assess how well the narrative goals have

been impressed upon the end user. In the best case, the respondent’s report will mirror the

valuation of objects as delivered in the message. In a worst-case scenario, the respondent will

report no knowledge of what is being asked. In the gray area lie diffuse answers that may or may

not indicate the effectiveness of communication. Note that the outcomes have different political

consequences. No report can imply lack of interest or it can denote a failure to communicate. If

the analyst regards the message delivery system as monolithic and coherent, he may not think to

assess loss along the way due to corruption, noise or distortion. Instead, he may focus on poor

matching between declared and desired interests or poor choice in message making. That is, the

fault is placed with an author misreading citizen demands rather than with channel failure.

SECTION TWO: APPLYING THE FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER 5: ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE MESSAGE STREAMS FROM ONE

OR MORE SPEAKERS

PART 1: THE VALUE OF TIME: EVALUATING CONSISTENCY AND CREDIBILITY IN

MESSAGING

Message constructions do not happen only once. The nature of political communication is

to signal values and consistently promote ones platform. Competition with other broadcasters,

whether political, religious, economic or sociocultural creates a need to speak often and about

many subjects. The ramifications of a single speaker dealing with audiences over time is

considered in this section.

A single speaker may produce multiple messages about the same topic or event. Each

message transmission is defined as a stream. A static snapshot would reveal the differences.

Table 5.1 covers these variants at the origin Time t0. A speaker may communicate different

versions of the same message in order to attract a particular audience. Perhaps elements B and C

have committed followers and thus they comprise a politically salient interest group.

FIGURE 5.1 MATRIX OF MESSAGING STREAMS

Consistency in Messaging over Time

Message

Authorial Output Time t0Time t1Time

Message Stream 1 ABC ABC ABC

Message Stream 2 AB A AB

Message Stream 3 BC B C

In the example, focusing only on Time t0, the author drafts three distinct messages, ABC,

AB and BC. These may reflect the interest level his audience has for each element and are

tailored for the receiver. The first message is provides a comprehensive report – all elements are

covered and is an objective account. Messages 2 and 3 are each abridged. Here the analyst must

also determine the target audience and the reach of the channels used. Are the audiences linked

naturally or by virtue of common carrier? If each message is broadcast to mutually exclusive

audiences, the speaker accomplishes enhanced differentiation – he appears responsive to the

concerns of specific groups even though in sum his position conflicts of flips. If on the other

hand, there is leakage or what is defined as channel crosstalk, receivers may receive more than

one stream and thus acquire contrasting news from the same speaker. Crosstalk can damage the

credibility of the speaker –why are there multiple versions for the same issue or event? At the

same time, crosstalk can be helpful to citizens- they can become aware of a speakers tendency

toward strategic rather than sincere communication and they can perhaps learn more about the

issue and about what their fellow citizens are interested in.

The complexity of communication is complicated further by the introduction of a

temporal element. By accounting for time, the analyst can now view the dynamics of not just a

single message but a stream. For each stream, what messages follow on?

Political reality plays out with articulation and feedback. Politicians attempt to assert

their power and position not just once but over time. News is renewed for a given topic until new

events and issues demand attention. New details may emerge or feedback from audiences may

cause the speaker to modify his message over time. A political information environment is one

that is always unfolding.

That being said, a politician may cling to a particular narrative regardless of

circumstance, out of principle or other devotion. A message stream that does not change over

time is defined as consistent. Stream 1 in Table 5.1 illustrates this case.

On the other hand, perhaps the speaker feels that he can be more selective in his

narratives for audiences interested in elements B and C. For these groups, he disentangles the full

account to focus on more biased versions as seen in Streams 2 and 3. There are two ways to

interpret these kinds of results. The first is to examine the output of each stream and analyze why

the speaker changed his message. This approach tracks individual streams over time and is a kind

of narrative analysis. By comparing streams by channel, the political analyst can then profile the

communicative strategies of the speaker and design further studies to measure the effects of each

variant.

A second approach is to focus on reception exposure by channel and as a whole. Putting

oneself in the place of the recipient, how would the analyst reconcile the input stream? When

messaging is consistent, ABC-ABC-ABC, it is easy to know what the people have to learn from.

But when the stream is instead AB-A-AB or BC-B-C, how the person processes their data inputs

are not as clear. The analytic framework thus illustrates the manner in which inputs can change

for individuals. This occurs when there only one speaker produces multiple messages. If there are

more actors with the same capabilities, it is clear that input loads by size, depth and frequency

across issue and event can expand dramatically.

PART 2: EVALUATING SPEAKER CREDIBILITY

There is another consequence to consistency or variation in messaging output. What a

speaker says casts a shadow, creates expectations and affects his reputation for truth, his

credibility and ultimately, his authority. The motive to paint different pictures can prove

expedient in the short run but costly in the long run. The following analysis steps through the

ramifications of communicative consistency and its costs and benefits.

Take the following example. At time t0, some Event E, an explosion, occurs that the

people clamor for details about. Why did it happen, who is responsible, what is the solution? Was

it an accident, and if so was it negligence? Or was it a terrorist act and if so, who is culpable,

have they been caught and why was the tragedy not foreseen or forestalled? A political report is

issued to calm people’s nerves and set a baseline of knowledge. The more credible information

the speaker has on the event, the more likely he will expound on causes and solutions. His first

message initiates a linear sequence that will have new messages introduced over time. As time

passes t1, t2, t3 and so on, more details are learned and the speaker transmits updates.

A challenge for the reporter is to get the facts right and remain consistent in doing so. A

task for political speakers is to also properly attribute causes, apply solutions and instill

confidence and trust. The sum of each actor’s messaging affect what people know and also how

they view their messenger. As a recipient tunes in and monitors her news feeds she may track the

use of facts and analysis over each message received. Is the story consistent in its depictions and

constant in using the same arguments the same way each time? Consistency is defined as the

regular use of the same elements across messages. Constancy is defined as the tendency for an

object to not change in its meaning or application.

5.2 Consistency: Message At0 à At1à At2…Atn = always the same message at times t1, t2,…tn 5.3

Constancy: Element A stands for A always and not: A becomes A’, then A’’ or incremental

variance with each use.

Tracking these characteristics enables the receiver to evaluate the credibility of the

speaker if direct communication, and the speaker-channel combination, if mediated. Inconsistent

messaging can be tolerated in the short run. Given a stream of updates, inconsistent reports,

contradictions and changes in one’s analysis, the speaker can afford minor deviations in part

because they may fall below the threshold of scrutiny due to triviality or non-reception. That

small errors and omissions are not damaging is self-explanatory. Non-reception occurs when the

receiver does not tune in and catch the error. The logic is as follows: items may be streamed in

time intervals, if a politician makes few or no mistakes, individuals who tune in intermittently

may not be aware of the mistake. Only someone who tunes in constantly will be aware of the

issue. If the speaker continues to make mistakes, he will eventually be caught live by all viewers.

For the speaker, long-run inconsistent can prove disastrous as recipients may begin to discount

his messaging to the point of ambivalence, disregard or resistance. For this reason, competitors

embrace the opportunity to comment on a competitor’s mistakes, rebroadcasting excerpts

alongside their own new commentary. Equipped with channel amplification that is broad, intense

and often, a commentator can ensure that the public will be saturated with another person’s bad

news.

Authority and legitimacy may be put at risk by action. The irony is that the leader with

unquestioned authority has the greatest means and incentive to message insincerely. His systems

of control and oppression short circuit public discussion and he may wish to take liberties in his

messaging. It is because his authority is highest that inconsistent messaging can chip away with

great effect. The converse is true of the speaker with poor provenance. People need to learn to

trust an unknown and do so by experience. An untrustworthy source only gains credibility by

proof, a trusted source gains credibility by expectation. This is the first inkling that in political

reality, a speaker’s identity brackets his content for better or for worse.

Applying the analytic framework thus reveals how communicative action imposes a

selfregulating quality of narration. Just because a speaker has the power to signal does not mean

that he will be trusted – he must build that trust since departures from previous messaging

diminish that valuable asset. Even with only one source, the ultimate limited information

environment, a receiver retains the capacity to disbelieve. A political leader’s power to control

public expression does not preclude subjective appraisal. The self-logic of narrative is such that

once expressed, subsequent radical change in messaging is difficult without penalizing one’s own

authority and even unitary, unidirectional flows are constrained by path dependence.

In democracy, the benchmark standard is openness of information and transparency in

dealings. For this reason, political leaders operate under the putative shadow of public oversight.

Competitors and critics are justified in attempting to pry open secrets. Given these

circumstances, political operatives may adjust their political communications in ways that

minimize the backlash from inaccurate messaging. One solution may be to articulate simple

themes and policy positions that can easily cohere over message and over time. By dumbing

down one’s political pronouncements, the political speaker minimizes the risk of self-

contradiction and its attendant negative evaluation. This scenario is not necessarily a boon to

democracy, though. The reductive tendency diminishes the level of detail citizens have access to

and thus also affects the conditions for a truly informed consent.

With respect to scholarship, the analytic framework enables a pointed line of inquiry.

Adopting the receiver’s stance, the political analyst might ask why should the receiver should

trust this message from this author arriving by way of this source? Given the equilibrium

conditions described by path dependence, the analyst may desire to know the levels at which

discounting occurs, by speaker, issue and time. Some may employ data mining studies to

evaluate content streams that track how a speaker’s messaging changes in its composition and its

use of terms and arguments.

CHAPTER 6: THE EXPANDING NETWORK: ANALYZING THE EFFECTS

OF MULTIPLE SPEAKERS, MESSAGES AND CHANNELS

PART 1: THE SENDER-INTERMEDIARY-RECEIVER RELATION

In Chapter 3, the concept of the sender transmission line and the construction of message

units was introduced. When these two are combined, the core construct of communications

becomes clear. The manner in which an idea circulates in a network depends on numerous factors

including the productive capacity of agents to author, transmit, intervene or receive signals.

Actors possess different capabilities and their behavior finds tangible expression in the

substantive content of message streams. Using the framework, the political analyst is equipped to

explain an integrated picture of communicative action by examining who says what, when and

how and under what conditions. Thus, the framework covers action within a cell – the choices

and decisions at each node – and, by tying nodes together, helps to bring into focus the linked

relations of choices that may be related across nodes. Decisions to participate or intervene in a

message stream is never discrete and compartmentalized – upstream actions always have

downstream repercussions. The reasons behind intervention depend on both the actor and the

observer. Ideas are not transmitted in a vacuum devoid of time, space, and region or free from

important political factors such as identity, power relations, organization or machination. By

elucidating the complex of communication as an activity, the political motivations behind

specific manifestations can be discerned. In order to accomplish this, the next step is to

investigate what happens with the introduction of multiple actors, channels, receivers, and

message streams.

In a political system there may be multiple speakers with varying levels of authority,

credibility, access or power to intervene in or create political discourse. These speakers may be

differentiated according to resource base. In a capital intensive, mass communications paradigm,

access to broadcast power is limited by providers. Political elite and media companies interact

regularly and some politicians may favor one company while some companies may favor certain

politicians or parties. Particular political actors and media corporations may also have their own

following. As a result, the relationship between various categories of actors as a whole and

between specific types of actors may be friendly or hostile. The simple message sequence

proposed so far establishes an arm’s length relationship between Sender, Intermediary and

Receiver. In reality, actors populate the nodes on a communications network at different levels of

closeness. The relationship between communication participants can be graphed spatially with

hyphens used to delineate distance: S-I-R thus becomes S-I—R or S—I-R The first example

describes an equal distance between each node while the next two reveal closer relations between

SI and IR, respectively. After analyzing the relationship between known actors, the political

analyst can group and demarcate the many pipelines one might find in a political system

according to proximity and thus reveal the densities across the channels that comprise sub-

graphs. The use of SI indicates closeness of an intermediary. A captive intermediary

would be a state broadcasting company or a newspaper that is the official outlet of the

government. The Soviet newspaper Pravda’s role in the now defunct USSR is one such case.

There may be times when an intermediary is closely associated or linked with a demographic.

Such organizations can market their services to people wishing to reach a specific audience.

Local providers may have a trusted relationship that can deliver messaging to key demographics.

For this reason, politicians may seek access to convention proceedings for groups such as the

National Rifle Association or American Medical Association. The availability of differentiated

provider-audience groupings may be an indication of a pluralist society but deeper investigation

is necessary. For this reason, the analyst can apply the S-I-R framework to deconstruct and

stratify a political information system according to its component S-I-R relationships. Doing so

may reveal telling patterns. Is the network extended and organic or centralized? Does

information flow in all directions or from limited sources or limited gates? How large or small

are the sub-graphs? This method provides a counterpoint to methods such as legal analysis of

constitutional law and prosecutions as a means of establishing freedom of information and

pluralist public expression. Information providers seek to meet the needs and requirements of

end users. The availability of news services whose topics and feeds can be aggregated on an a la

carte basis speaks to the hyper differentiation of news based on demand. People choose from an

array of intermediaries and the stories and analysis they provide. The analyst must discriminate

between consolidation in message authorship and news provision. If there are limited voices,

pluralism is a façade. The supply of channels is without substance if only select viewpoints are

carried.

The power of a relationship between speaker and receiver is in the exchange of

information that fosters mutual understanding and leads to the development of an implicit

narrative, with new chapters building on themes set out before. A political speaker thus has

reason to find intermediaries who have these relationships as he can then insert his voice into a

trusted relationship and enjoy deeper amplification of his message.

PART 2: INFORMATION FLOWS EXPAND OUTWARDS: NODE INSERTION AND

GEOMETRIC EXPANSION

Speakers need to use intermediaries simply because they are not professional at or have

control over professional broadcast apparatuses. But speech itself can travel across many

networks, with more or less touch and greater or lesser speed and accuracy. A unified framework

can begin to limn these macro level aspects, the nature of the vectors of information flow.

Networks expand on all axes. Imagine a group of friends – some are more talkative and have

larger social networks. The velocity of gossip may differ according to which person receives it.

Some people are shy, others willing to keep secrets and still others ready to relay as quickly as

possible. The coloring that is added may also vary with more or less drama, more or less

criticism attached. Formal political networks lie in the hands of large organizations – political

parties, media companies, newspapers and other related business entities – but they do not

comprise the entirety of the political information environment. Recall that although the analytic

framework applies a dynamic network concept, what it is attempting to explain is the information

environment. The field people navigate to find their political bearings is larger than the network

of pipelines and in fact includes all the people.

It is here that the model departs from the paradigm of absorption testing as a measure of

political communication effectiveness. Instead, political communication as an expressive action

is aligned with a form of political participation. To partake in political discourse is to engage

politically, perhaps not in the classical sense of volunteering or overt political activities but in the

conveyance of information that assigns value to objects in life. People can affect what others

know by sharing or not, declaiming or not. The capacity of individuals to activate their social

linkages and provide alternate lines of communication is a critical resource that can act as a lever

to balance political debate. To this point, the model has discussed communications sequences

with a minimum number of participants. A full picture of information flows, however, is replete

with many actors, some working in concert, others working against. As each actor is added to a

transmission scheme, he can have multiple roles, as author, receiver, or intermediary resulting in

a geometric explosion in the total number of interconnections. The basic model is thus expanded

into an array that is comprised of multiple senders, intermediaries, and audiences. The expansion

series below underscores the interconnections. In fact, the matrices could be larger – multiple

senders, intermediaries and receivers. Note that network growth need not be symmetric. Certain

branches can be larger, dovetailing with the concept that society has divisions and communities

and certain providers have greater or lesser ability to tap into audiences.

R R

S" " &InRnSc mfR Rp

6.1 R R

The formula in figure 6.1 can be transposed to position three speakers in parallel and in

competition. At some point, one can imagine that as the matrix expands out, speakers, or in this

case, politicians, will be vying for the attention and affection of the same receivers or citizens.

R R

S" " &InRnSc mfR Rp

R R

S" " &InRnSc mfR Rp

R R

S" " &InRnSc mfR Rp

6.2 R R

Given the number of potential streams, a further takeaway is that the political information

environment can become quite busy or filled with signal quite quickly. In the upcoming chapters,

the thesis will analyze the implications of a mixed signal environment as a consequence of

multiple data inputs leading to variegated and heterogeneous news exposure for individuals.

The agency of the individual must also be considered. Figures 6.1 and 6.2 still only consider top-

down issuers. What if people start their own transmission? Anyone with a political agenda has an

incentive to intertwine report with narrative, interjecting where plausible her own political

perspective on events and message streams. The Internet is the example par excellence of citizen

created content for all manner of subject, in all types of media and presented or hosted in a

variety of formats. It is important to acknowledge the critical transformation of a receiver at the

end of a feed for her productive capacities: Receiver becomes a Sender S or, RàS and the

sequence above recapitulates along her personal network.

R R

S" "I Rwhere R & S S,^ hfR Rp

6.3 R R

The logic behind an expanding series of matrices is that information flows are limited by

the capacity and motivation of agents. When the gates to audience reach are lowered, as is the

case with digital connection to a World Wide Web, the natural networks that people have can be

easily migrated to digital form. Citizens can be both receiver and speaker, reader and author.

They can be agents in a network and as such can and do intervene, comment, distort and imagine

political narratives. The empowerment of the people will be covered in Chapter 8.

The first step in the multi actor environment is to model disparate competing streams and

examine the implications for the speaker and the receiver, respectively. The analysis begins by

addressing the possibility of a single author attempting to reach a heterogeneous audience. The

speaker will need to decide whether to craft different messages for different audiences and

whether to use different delivery channels and media formats. The democratic political ideal is

that the interests of the many are met; the reality is that political actors may give lip service to all

but in fact only care about select issues. Regardless of interior motive, political communications

serve as a guidepost for value and intent. What position does the political actor stake? The

declamation of a political position carves discursive space that must be defended. If audiences

can be isolated and insulated, political actors may speak more openly. The following examines

why this may be the case.

Confidentiality is a function of message broadcast control. If a speaker can hold a

conversation of speech behind a firewall, safe from observation by non-interlocutors, he may

either be more candid or more pointed in his remarks. A speaker may say things that apply only

to the audience in question and deliver a tightly focused narrative. Democratic political

communication in its best form is responding to the specific demands of each constituency and

information the public of generally important affairs. Formally, this implies a match between

elements of a message stream with the interests of the receiving party: topic A is covered with

people who only care about A, topic B is covered with those who care about B and AB to those

who care about both. The ideal political strategy would be to isolate each demographic and

mobilize support across all needed groups using incrementally tailored speech free of crosstalk or

signal contamination. The mechanics of the Machiavellian strategy that underlies

Schumpeter’s manufactured will is now clear – the politician should produce messages A, B, AB,

ABC, BC, AC and so on as long as he can control his information streams and targets. Failure to

restrict access to tailored content can cause problems for governance and credibility. If people

can acquire the conflicting message streams, they will become aware of the duplicity in the

speaker’s meta communications strategy.

If political authority wishes to exert control over discourse, intermediaries too have their

own motivations. As economic entities, they seek to sustain their business, earn profit and

possibly expand. In the absence of contracted messages to carry, they must generate their own

programming. In political communication, the landscape of news delivery is shaped by a

particular reality: while any one citizen may be far removed from events and inside knowledge,

on average there will be someone who does know the truth. By investing in news gathering and

analytic resources, a media company accomplishes multiple goals. When there is nothing to

transmit for others, the politics division can provide its own report and offer ongoing

commentary and analysis of affairs of state and the performance of governors and government.

This keeps the line of communication live or hot between the media organization and its

audience. When a politician speaks, the media company is then equipped to not only carry the

message but also provide added detail, deliver insight into what is being said, and incorporate its

own sense of the proper political context. Such efforts may be incisive and critical but objective

or slanted, inflammatory and hyper-politicizing. Whatever the motive and character, a minimally

complex set of pipelines includes competing speakers as well as an independent media

organization, each of whom operate in the same time and place over the same audience.

Competitive messaging can play out as multiple messages produced by competing actors, a

Journalist, a Politician L and a Politician R. The analysis proceeds for a given time frame or

static snapshot as well as a stream over time. Note that the data in Table 6.4 recapitulate that in

Table 5.1 but now each message stream is issued by a different speaker. With this move, the

analysis changes from a problem of speaker consistency and concomitant credibility to a

comparative analysis of pluralist politics and cross-message benchmarking. In the updated

variant, citizens now receive up to three distinct messages from actors who each have their own

political agendas. Knowledge of the source provides a way to reconcile data loads against their

source. If an individual can access all three feeds over time, she can perhaps reconstruct a

coherent, truthful image of the event at hand.

TABLE 6.4 MATRIX OF RECEIVED NARRATIVES

Messaging by actor over time

Actor Message Time t0 Time t1 Time t2 Comment

Journalist Stream 1 ABC ABC ABC Objectively

comprehensive

Politician L Stream 2 AB A AB Windowed and framed

Politician R Stream 3 BC B C Windowed and framed

Messages are the generative output of authorship that melds raw data with framework.

The simple model proposed in Chapter 3 now finds elaboration here. A comparative analysis of

the output matrix in Table 6.4 may lead the analyst to the following conclusions. The analyst

might rely on the consistent message stream produced by the journalist in Stream 1 as a control.

Message streams 2 and 3 are then appraised against that benchmark. In Table 6.4, the parsing of

original content ABC down to AB in Message Stream 2 might be attributed to Politician L’s

ideology. The same might hold true for the derivation of BC in Message Stream 3 as a function

of Politician R’s ideology. Here one can see coverage bias at work. The fact that both accounts

conflict may further confirm the existence of competing implicit generative models.

How to account for changes to messaging over time? Perhaps the two politicians change

their approach based on feedback and attempt to improve their standing with wrinkles in their

discourse. After all, speakers are capable of listening in and learning and they may adjust their

messages accordingly. The model also provides a way to analyze the confluence of messages

about the same subject. It is easy for citizens to decry the media as biased but this tendency

wrongly implies a monolithic entity and uniform message streams.

The presence of the Journalist’s neutral record, poses a problem for the politicians’

abridged messaging. Not only does the full account in Stream 1 properly inform the public, it

also reveals biased narratives as they really are. The citizen with access to all three streams can

now evaluate Politician L and R. This is useful to the citizen who seeks to make an informed

decision. Recall that democracy demands oversight and information is necessary to that function.

Channel sampling enables the citizen to decide whom and what to believe. This approach also

allows for the analyst to use channel divergence as a measure of political deliberation and

polarization. To what extent to narratives diverge or converge and what roles do speakers play in

constructing these positions?

Saying whatever one must given the circumstances or playing to the audience is a form of

political manipulation. In the absence or verification, promises made can be forgotten or reneged.

The incessant stream of new news and new updates favors producers. The more one fills the

airwaves, the less the past matters. Exercising democratic oversight means that citizens must

demand an accounting for misrepresentations. One way to mitigate bias is to demand multiple

sources of information that can be verified.

Given an ongoing communications relationship, a receiver need not have direct access to

an original event or source to determine whether her information feeds are problematic or

corruptible. Changes within an author’s stream and especially across multiple streams can reveal

consistency with or departures from the normal treatment, or the average signal, over time.

Changes may be attributed to either the speaker or messenger and gross deviations may cause the

attentive receiver to investigate the source of such disruption. With careful scrutiny, the receiver

can work to discern patterns that characterize each actor and set a baseline performance. Further

opportunity arises if one is given the opportunity to compare multiple streams covering the same

event. Convergence and variance analysis conducted across channels might enable the erstwhile

recipient and consumer of information to make critically informed decisions by normalizing

across feeds to determine the true nature of the event and the manner in which participants

manipulate their reports. The effect of triangulation is corroboration and normalization; data

convergence might be taken as a measure of truthfulness and characteristic departures from a

common theme might be cast as the political tint that each stakeholder imparts. Overemphasis

on large scale mass media may lead the political analyst to wrongly surmise that the political

information environment is globally homogeneous. One must distinguish between the channel

and the information flows. Formal media, no matter how large and well-equipped, do not account

for all that happens in political communication. Indeed, different actors and their attendant

information networks may operate oblivious to one another. Standalone sub-networks that opt out

of formal channels may operate in plain view, if politically irrelevant, or hidden if they pose a risk

to existing authority. Analysis of politics that centers on existing structures and institutions risk

tracking a Schmittian conception of politics (Schmitt, 2007) that narrowly defines the concept of

the political on the concrete phenomenon of actual governance. The discussion of politics, of

course, is not restricted to formal arenas alone. Students of political culture would aver that the

collective presence of the people, in their attitudes, predilections, satisfaction (Inglehart, 1997;

Abramson, 1995; Dalton, 2001), or anomie (Eckstein 1998) can impart pressure on political

governance. As legitimacy is rooted in a narrative of just rule, any regime, whether authoritarian

or democratic, must issue narratives with coherent internal logic. The possibility of sociopolitical

information networks that operate informally, or at least without the auspice of formal,

governmental empowerment, means that in fact individuals can play a role in not only routing and

shaping discourse through a political environment but also populate the ideas that stock the

ideational reserves of that space.

PART 3: THE REASONS FOR AND BENEFITS OF SIGNAL AMPLIFICATION

The desire to be heard is a fundamental end of expression. Political speech as a

purposeful social activity always has some target, be it a competing idea or a favored audience.

The fact that signaling is a supply-side phenomenon – one can speak regardless of whether the

other party wishes or intends to listen – means that information flows will proliferate, for better

or for worse. What gives rise to multiple message streams? Why do speakers resort to multiple

channels if one should suffice to inform? The framework enables the analyst to identify the logic

behind amplification for individuals in pursuit of their own goals, in the context of a competitive

environment, multiple signalers and the concomitant cacophony of noise and interruption. The

motivation behind the choices made with respect to audiences targeted and the intermediaries

used is both political and economic. Political goals and economic resources play an important

role in affecting actors’ priorities and the way they evaluate cost and benefit. When speakers and

hearers are embedded alongside each other, circumstances for broadcast and reception change.

The drive to be heard further shapes the politician’s move to claim broadcast bandwidth in order

to signal broadly, loudly and constantly.

On his own, a speaker is severely limited in his ability to reach a wide audience.

Hightouch personal contact test the limits of endurance and resources and personal interactions

create problems of message control. Direct speech cannot be edited and the speaker may be

subject to live cross-examination. In lieu of stumping, the speaker can rely on organization and

technology to provide the means to significantly alter his capacity of voice in a controlled

environment. One solution is to implement parallel delivery conduits to amplify signal

horizontally. This can be accomplished by recruiting others to assist and build one’s own

broadcast system or by retaining a professional media organization. Amplification not only

improves scope of audience but also contact depth. The resourceful speaker, intent on

maximizing time, money and audience attention, would want to know the level of service

capacity, audience size and demographics reached by a given channel. Some channels may offer

high capacity and a large correlated audience while others may offer a narrow focus that can be

utilized for niche broadcasting and idea testing purposes. Although distortion and noise may be

problematic, politicians may find use even for channels that incur losses and distortions in

transmission. Indeed, a speaker may anticipate the changes an intermediary will wreak and

employ a biased channel that exaggerates and sharpen his message in ways which he would not

dare do himself.

For a given Event E, there may be conflict over which political party is best suited to

address the issue. Politicians aspire to more than reportage. The selection of elements by which

to draft a message leaves open the possibility that omitted or underserved aspects are fulfilled by

commentators and competitors. In a supply and demand conceptualization, discursive space is

seized by those with means and opportunity. Governance imposes certain constraints. In

democracy, leaders must speak to the common good. Tangential or fringe issues may need to be

rejected or ignored for fear of alienating mainstream support. Those who do not have or seek

political power, however, are in position to criticize and inveigh themselves. For some Event

ABCD, three different political activists with X, Y and Z philosophies may propose counter

narratives. The urge to do so may arise out of a concern for the truth, for broadcasting missing

information, for competing and arguing with power or for catering to forgotten minorities. Table

6.5 presents a matrix of different possibilities. Imagine that two reports exist, the reporter’s

account, ABC, and Politician X’s ABx variant. When Politician X ignores original elements C

and D he creates an opportunity for others to enter the conversation. Elements CD may matter to

interest groups that Politician X ignores. The unmet demand may compel competitors, Politicians

X and Y, to cover these areas and audiences.

TABLE 6.5 MESSAGING FOR AUDIENCES

Messages Tailored to Audiences

Event (Raw

Elements) Author Message Content Comment

Message 1 Objective Reporter ABC Full

narrative

Truthful

Message 2 Politician X ABx Targeted Biased towards B

Message 3 Politician X ADx Targeted Biased towards

Message 4 Politician Z BCy Biased towards C

Thus the information field has a variety of reports on a single event. A competitive

messaging landscape provides opportunities for the receiver to discern the truth and for the

political scholar to study political expression and interaction. Competing messages may reflect

niche targeting, where different constituencies demand different narratives. Although pluralism

embraces diversity there may be a cost to fractured discourse for a single event. Split

communication promotes division. What if each politician speaks to different groups? If for

example, the political community’s dominant ethnic group receives messages 2 and 3 while a

minority group receives message 4, would this promote a difference in knowledge and outlook

that only exacerbate tensions? What is the end of political communication? Should it be

responsive to citizen demand or an extension of politics and power? At heart, the question is

whether the politician is marketing, persuading, or responding. To determine whether political

actors do this requires further investigation.

Intermediaries can do more than amplify an original message. They can sharpen the focus

of a message and deliver it to target groups, with arguments heightened to trigger a political base

or attempt to destroy an opposition target. The political author may choose whom to hand off a

message to, anticipating favorable outcomes based on the prior reputation of that channel. This

tactic can be termed parameterized distortion. A primary benefit is that by handing off, the

political author erects a barrier that can be used to preempt backlash. By using a proxy the author

can argue that he is not responsible for the speech of others. In doing this, the politician can

accomplish two enviable tasks –sparking a niche, activist base and deflecting mainstream

criticism.

An even more sophisticated strategy is to amplify one’s signal discretely using parallel

channels. The use of political action committees and corporations to fund political advertising

stand as preeminent examples. A politician must cover many issues and still manage his general

support. He must activate his core support, convert neutral undecided and de-activate opposition.

The goal is to spread his message and mobilize granular voices in the network to operate on his

behalf. The logic of communicative action circumscribes the horizon – he cannot flip flop or

contradict himself and he does not want to directly antagonize those he may need to court.

Parallel, unattached but sympathetic organizations can test messages and field the fire of outrage.

Funded third party political speech is not constrained by the overhang of public office and is

often shielded by clever campaign or association names and corporate, that is non-singular,

identity. If there is a limit, it is not in the promulgation of data flows only the economic and

technological resources need to implement a transmission. Political speech is certainly not

constrained by lax demand. As a result, speakers have an incentive to oversupply in hopes of

activating allies, dominating public debate and damaging enemies. Given such conditions, it is

not surprising that public discourse appears divided – pipelines working at odds at maximum

capacity will accomplish this. The consequence of over-amplification is that the people suffer.

They must deal with constant bombardment and sift through increasing noise.

PART 4: THE EFFECT OF SIMULTANEOUS, PARALLEL BROADCASTING ON

RECEPTION CONDITIONS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR AGENDA SETTING

RESEARCH

Since people may acquire their knowledge by monitoring diverse political messaging

streams, the political analyst must also account for the apprehension of similar news from

different sources. What might this mean for generalizing from findings derive from the

singlestream agenda setting approach? By design, the agenda setting experiment delimits

information exposure by time and weights the value of particular subcomponents. The surprise is

that subjects with prior positions should change their report after exposure but even this should

not be unexpected if the experimenter accepts the possibility of a learning response and the tacit

accession that a broadcast is authoritative and credible. It is these latter two aspects that need to

be teased out.

Beyond this, agenda setting experiment cannot be easily scaled to mimic realistic news

gathering habits and information provision schemes. What if some streams repeat and others hop

channels? People move through a dense field of signals, some of which are political. As shown

earlier, competing political actors reach out across platforms over time with messages that

change as events warrant. As a result, the input to a person’s knowledgebase is likely a function

of aggregated exposure. Given these circumstances, the limits of the survey for discovering

actual information inputs become apparent. Time lagged and interval based they tend to simplify

signal flow in a time window to impressions that are either recent or more easily recalled. But

they do not capture either the actual sequence of messages or the discursive interventions the

respondent may have contributed. Methods that examine hot topics culled from headlines of

select newspapers provides a snapshot of trends for a population but they do not necessarily

reflect actual input conditions for any given person. For this reason, information exposure should

not be reduced to a unitary phenomenon that applies to all people in a political system In

contrast, the analyst who can track data acquisition directly can begin to see distinctions in input

matrices and then design models to evaluate specific kinds of exposure.

Imagine Citizens G and H encounter a report on the same political topic three times but

Citizen G hears it three times from the same source while Citizen H hears it once from three

sources:

VARIANT 1: G encounters topic A1 on Channel 1 on three different occasions.

FIGURE 6.6 VARIANT 2: H encounters topic A1 across Channels 1, 2 and 3

In both cases the actual stream of events can be recorded as A1+A1+A1 but they are not

the same. The use of the analytic framework provides a way for the researcher to embark on

finegrained detail in his research design. Cognitive approaches to evaluating information input

can be updated to reflect scalar versus repetitive reception. The researcher can anticipate this

problem and modify his design to control for exposure within or across sources.

The communications scholar may approach this finding differently. As a point of

methodology, how can he take advantage of data streams available on the Internet to model these

types of exposure encounters? Transposing the analytic pipeline model of flows into a dynamic,

four dimensional histogram, the researcher can monitor different feeds for overlap in messaging

and create a densitogram that charts common object usage by issue, actor and channel over time

or any combination thereof. How often do keywords appear in programming? How often is that

program transmitted? Time slots may be short or long and transmission duration may be limited

to one or cross multiple slots. For Web based transmission, programs may reside on splash pages

in prime areas then recede to the background as hyperlinks that reside on sidebars or in lower

levels of a site structure.

Another researcher might instead map programming content and then attempt to discover

the reason for overlap or variance. Does different programming reflect choices by the

intermediary or the political author? Are there patterns to the issues that converge and do these

reflect themselves in specific carriers thus revealing bias? Who is responsible for the pattern and

does it reflect a larger political strategy of communication? For example, signal repetition may

be optimal when the audience tends to have intermittent attention while cross channel

broadcasting may be optimal when one wishes to convey a heightened level of subject

importance. Or perhaps certain actors promote certain messages which are interrupted only by

special events or circumstances. Here the goal is to use the framework to illuminate areas of

operation structure research design to either apply, adapt or develop tools and methods

appropriate for analyzing the content that can be accessed digitally.

PART 5: DIFFERENTIATED TRANSMISSIONS AS THE RESULT OF MULTIPLE

SPEAKERS

Variations in exposure are a reflection of the input conditions that present themselves to

individuals. The prospects of hot or cold cognition, online or offline processing, group

psychology, ideology or principled deliberation are all contingent upon the actual array of data

that are available to the person to react to or reason with. A model of information flows that

accounts for the mechanism that feed into a person’s so-called black box of information

processing provides a way to control for what goes in and thus provides a way to balance this

with what researchers know comes out. For every action there is an equal, opposite reaction. For

every effect, there is a specific source. As a dynamic process of information flows, the Internet

provides the possibility to model and empirically investigate the confluence of inputs that lead to

the results found in survey based elicitation studies.

As described earlier, the information field can be reduced to the more basic notions of

broadcasting and reception, signal transmission and lock and the attendant conditions that attach

to each phase. What follows is an analysis of simple differential exposure and complex

differential exposure for one or more individuals in controlled time blocks and over time.

There are many sources for political information and people have options in choosing whom they

listen to, when, how often and for what purpose and what topics. Politicians may also vary in

how often they intervene in public discussion, on what issues and with what urgency.

Intermediaries are a bit different. On the one hand, they may operate on a regular, scheduled

basis in order to reap the benefits of their large capital investment, fixed costs, personnel

employment and desire to generate revenue. To this end, they seek to reach profitable audiences

and to transmit as much and as often as possible. People will only search so long for

programming and failure to transmit is a lost opportunity to reach a consumer. Thus

intermediaries have doubly reinforced incentive to keep their lines hot. How, why and when

political topics are inserted into their schedules thus varies by magnitude, social relevance and

customer demographic. Finally, in the recent era of digital device network access ubiquity, social

media provides new streams of current information and updates on every topic imaginable. As

expression is the input to erudition, social networks, are becoming prominent in their effect on

knowledge and learning.

In order to stratify the above blocks of actors types into political operatives, mass media

conglomerates or private citizen social networks, the analyst can apply the information flow

model to parse data streams into discrete channel feeds. This enables the analyst to deconstruct

monolithic broadcasts into segments and then analyze segments into content-agent linkages over

time. The key insight that digital content analysis offers is the ability to measure differential

programming and its portent for differential exposure. Table 6.7 provides a basic schematic that

depicts varied information flows by channel over time.

TABLE 6.7 STREAM NARRATIVE OVER TIME

Message Content Exposure by Channel

Table 6.7 depicts program content for three channels over seven time periods where each

block coloring represents a discrete narrative. In the example, each interval is one day so the

table covers one week’s worth of political information exposure. Accreting the output results in

three distinct patterns and thus three conflicting possibilities for political learning. Mixed

messaging will occur whether it is one person who views all three channels or three different

people each tuning in exclusively to a particular channel. Politics and public discussion are

affected whether one worries about mixed messaging received by the same person or three

people each receiving different information. Three viewers who tune in to Channels 1, 2, and 3

will be exposed to starkly different narratives and each person may have a different view of

political priorities.

The viewer of Channel 1 is exposed to an unchanging message – her view of the world

thus is reinforced and relatively homogeneous and static. Channel 2’s viewer sees different news

over time. What will the lingering impression be, the last two programs, the middle two or the

content that started the sequence? Finally, Channel 3 interleaves two programs in alternating time

blocks. Given this mix, what might the viewer report? Taken together, the streams in this graph

demonstrate the challenges of controlling what a receiver learns across and thus of achieving

agenda-setting across pipelines and viewers over time.

Time Channel 1 Channel 2 Channel 3

If people receive differential information, what do they do with it? What if the viewers

were to discuss their findings with one another? Would there be consensus or clash? Since the

content of Channel 1 is a common narrative will the group of three find consensus on the basis of

cross channel content convergence? Or will the unique narratives in channels two and three form

the basis for a fixed belief in the significance of exceptional information? Understanding

exposure can allow the analyst to develop second-stage research to explore the consequences of

mixed conditions in a follow-up investigation.

Table 6.7 can also be used as a template to show available programming for citizens to

sample. Tuning in to different channels at different times returns a mixed and possibly partial

narrative. If information is not uniform, program exposure is not likely to be uniform either. The

benefit of this model is that the analyst can design parameters to control for archetypal

information exposure scenarios. Uniform, chaotic, disjoint approaches can all be modeled. Like a

bingo board, every citizen may end up with a different net data exposure, undermining any

conception that news is beamed into everyone’s awareness in the same way across time. Tools to

measure and track programming can be designed and used in combination with survey methods

in order to triangulate behavior with actual information feeds and their joint effects.

CHAPTER 7: DIFFERENTIAL EXPOSURE MADE COMPLEX:

CONTROLLING FOR MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS AND ISSUE FRAMES

The element of time plays a crucial role in evaluating the impact and effect of political

communication. As mentioned earlier, for politicians, what matters is the short term. Messaging

is oriented to the acquisition and retention of power and the consolidation and affirmation of

one’s position and authority. Information channels are the building blocks of a network and the

sender-receiver links are the engines activate the system. Organized linkages may be silent but

dormancy does not imply triviality. The existence of established connections augurs the

possibility of renewed use. At the same time, as people continue to seek information, if one

channel falls silent, that person and thus that node may tune out. The fact that receivers are

senders can be translated into another capacity – agents are also gates and their presence or

absence routes messaging to their attached sub-network or forms and endpoint. The structure of

network relations can be further defined by elements external to the communicative process. This

is where political, economic and social considerations enter. The actors on a network may

collaborate based on shared interests, identity, business relations, geography or other concern.

The technology and capital resources with which actors are endowed act as multipliers that

determine the size, shape and quality of the network. At this point, the analytic model examines

the effect of time interval and the concept of velocity of flow. News travels and depending on

who is reporting and who is listening, the rate of delivery may differ by provider and thus by

recipient.

For this reason, the circulation of ideas depends on more than the persuasive power of an

argument. Network reach, flow status and user access matter. People are embedded throughout a

political information system in different micro-locales, each with different types of proximate

experience and interaction due to geography, cultural history, religion, language, habit, and

education. Although an information conduit superstructure may tie people together content may

not flow equally from and to all parts. It would therefore be shortsighted for the analyst to

presume that national level topics filter down to everyone. Moreover, signaling may be targeted

to reach proximate or relevant audiences. Speakers choose whom the wish to influence and

receiver tune in or out of news and politics.

When there are multiple speakers vying for the potentially limited attention span of the

public, the choice in messaging may reflect cognizance of meta transmission conditions.

Knowledge of the tendencies of people situated in various locales may affect the manner in

which a political actor develops his political communication strategy. If the goal is to persuade

and contact is distal and mediated, the speaker will need to consider the effect of signal spread

and competing voices as he plans both his message and his distribution strategy. What kind of

message will endure best in various conditions of transit? What tactics will optimize his

signaling? Should he transmit simple messages repeatedly across all carriers or intermittently

with more dense messages? Given that some audiences may prefer while others are hostile to

certain channels, is there a way to beam a message without suffering collateral damage from

messenger reputation? The fact is that manufacturing information in a noisy environment is not a

given and the speaker must take care to ensure that his messages converge and appear accurate,

forceful, and consistent.

Seen from the perspective of the receiver, the variegated strategies for message content,

type and broadcast characteristic result in an equally complicated picture of signal reception.

There may not be a dominant or even a plurality of messages at a given time and certainly over

time. Issues come and go and how they are emphasized and the level of interest people have can

wax and wane. On this basis, the compelling agenda-setting findings derived from controlled

conditions confronts a more realistic communications world that people navigate. When people

are exposed to a single weighted stream of information under experiment or artificial conditions,

common sense would dictate that output responses track input load simply on the basis of

learning. Can one learn about chaos from an ordered environment? It is this question that the

analytic model of diverse flows attempts to answer.

Multiple speakers implies multiple messages, exposures and input combinations. A

simple 4x4 model can be constructed that underscores the colorations. For some, input may be

uniform while for others, input may be chaotic. These depend on how a receiver tracks a signal

over time. The political ramifications are such that learning produces political knowledge and the

basis for discussion and deliberation is affected by the positions people have when they enter

discourse.

TABLE 7.1 VARIEGATED EXPOSURE BY TIME AND RECIPIENT

DIFFERENTIAL MESSAGING PRODUCES VARIED EXPOSURE

Issue Frame Time t1 Time t2 Time t3 Time t4 Fixed

Longitudinal Comment

Channel 1 R1 Uniform,

Constant

Channel 2 R2 Intermittent

Channel 3 R3 Varied

Channel 4 R4 Single

Static Reception R1a R2a R3a R4a

Mixed

Longitudinal R5a @t1 R5a @t2 R5a @t3 R5a @t4

In Table 7.1, the cell shading represents a unique message narrative being broadcast by

each channel at a given time. The analyst can examine the table for broadcast qualities – what

does each channel transmit and how often? He can also examine the table as it defines reception

conditions – what would a receiver, e.g. R1 or R1a, be exposed to over time for a given channel

or at a given time if tuning in to multiple channels? Using this framework, the analyst can then

explode a consumer’s information input load into an array and explore the consequences for

political evaluation and deliberation.

Channel 1 transmits a regular and uniform message and is hot or live at all times as all

blocks are filled in. In contrast, Channel 2 transmits a consistent message bloc but does so

intermittently. Channel 3 is varied in its output, with each time period relaying a different

message. Channel 4 broadcasts only once. The table is designed to explore the most severe

consequences of highly heterogeneous exposure, thus, each channel produces unique content,

there is no overlap. Applying a framework to hypothetical test cases enables the political analyst

to anticipate likely conditions that logic dictates. These considerations would then enable the

researcher to establish tentative design parameters for an empirical study. With this template, the

analyst can then anticipate different types of inputs for a recipient who tunes in longitudinally to

a fixed channel or iteratively to multiple channels at a specific time.

The receiver satisfied with minimal effort to acquire her information may tune into a

single channel out of habit, ambivalence or preference. This type of information acquirer is found

in the column labeled Longitudinal Reception. Another archetype is the receiver who seeks

maximum information and scans available sources to build her knowledge. Her activity may be

limited to a single instance, thus for a given time period she surfs across intermediaries and

speakers. The row labeled Static Reception covers this type of receiver. One thing to note is that

interpreted this way, this row covers four different receivers, R1a-R4a, surfing for information in

each of the four time periods. The last row, Mixed Longitudinal, transposes the matrix by

channel across time and thus a given viewer, R5a, encounters a changing array despite tuning

into all channels at all periods. Each scenario and ideal type demands scrutiny starting from least

to most complex.

The simplest scenario is the individual who tunes into only one channel over time.

Focusing solely on input data, her political knowledge will thus depend on which channel she

receives. If knowledge is a function if presentation and repetition, different cycles may produce

different results. For the viewer of Channel 1 above, the message is repeated but static. This

signal scheme reinforces the same theme over time and from the sender’s point of view

safeguards against a failure to communicate in a given instance. That is, if a person misses the

news today, she is sure to receive the same content tomorrow. This quality introduces an

important operating assumption an author and speaker must have: given that there is no

guarantee that an end user will actually receive or acquire his message, he must control what he

can, which are the conditions of broadcast. When compared with the streams of the other

channels, Channel 1 produces the most coherent message with a transmission ratio of 4:1 versus

Channel 4.

Examining Table 7.1 more closely, one can see that if a narrative is broadcast

intermittently, audience members with irregular access may miss that particular feed. Compare

the experience of viewers R1 and R2 and their respective sources Channels 1 and 2. Imagine that

the only chance to get the news is during period t2. For both R2 and the broadcaster behind

Channel 2, this would be disastrous since there is no message transmission. Thus, one person has

information and the other person does not. As a general rule, information acquisition varies

according to channel access over time and learning and political knowledge as aggregates of

input reflect that exposure.

Channel 3 provides a different test case. The message conveyed differs in each period and

the viewer of this channel has by the end of the exposure the broadest base of knowledge. Again,

this stream can be evaluated as it benefits both the sender and the receiver. Assuming constant

reception, the person who transmits on Channel 3 is able to articulate the most complex and

dense message. From a political standpoint, increased intersubjective sharing may accomplish

two separate objectives – empathy and affinity on the basis of deeper understanding and the

development of knowledgeable adherents who can in turn spread the message in their social

networks in ways that exceed simplistic opinion-mongering. As will be discussed shortly, the

kind of message patterns that are beamed may reflect the strategic targeting of audiences

according to what is optimal and appropriate for that demographic.

Channel 4 models the single-shot broadcast, perhaps by a speaker with limited access to

distribution. In the example, he transmits once at time t2. Receiver R4 and broadcaster 4, in

comparison with their competitors, have the smallest margin of error. Failure to link at time t2

dooms the communication.

The analyst can now integrate the information environment for Receivers R1 through R4

for the time window t1 through t4. Viewed as a total system, the multiple streams reveal

disparities in the dissemination of message types. At one end is Channel 1, which produces four

of the same messages. At the other end is Channel 4 with one message one time. Channels 2 and

3 present different scenarios. Channel 2 provides minimal redundancy and maintains consistency

in its narrative output. Channel 4 produces unique content that will be missed if not tuned in and

trades redundancy and consistency for issue coverage. Each stream type represents possible

strategies for speakers as well as possible viewing habits for viewers. Modeling these outcomes

provides the analyst a template by which to investigate production and consumption

characteristics more carefully.

The analytic model accommodates the variety of topics transmitted as the outflow of

disparate pipelines, where each channel promotes its own agenda. The sum of these outflows

comprise the universe of inputs for a population. Table 7.1 can also be interpreted as a

simultaneous feed for one viewer, R5a, as well as a mixed stream for a set of receivers, R1a

through R4a. In the world, a person may encounter different feeds and different narratives for a

given event. She may also encounter windowing and framing in her message streams as speakers

attempt to guide discussion and debate. Since everything can be made political, strategic

communication works to emphasize preferred issues and positions and upbraid or ignore

unwanted topics.

Across periods, a person might apprehend a variety of news, with some repeating and

others occurring only once. Following the course R5a takes through the information streams over

time, it becomes clear that there are different possible outcomes for uptake. On one hand,

assuming full reception, R5a encounters a broad spectrum of narratives but only two narrative

repeat themselves, those provided by Channel 1 and 2. The consistency of broadcast over time

puts Channel 1 in position to perhaps stand out from an otherwise changing scene. If interviewed

after exposure, what will the respondent point to as his primary learning? What might he have

absorbed? On the basis of signal load, redundancy acts to weight information. Over four time

periods there are eleven total message narratives and Channel 1’s bloc comprises 4/11 of that

load. On this basis, an observer, political speaker or analyst alike, might conclude that repetition

has its merits.

There are other possible, wrinkles to the narrative feeds however that lie beyond the table.

What might the table portend as a window into the effects of political communication? Channel 3

transmits for different narratives but they may be related. Assuming that each channel has a

political character, narratives can build on prior messaging. In this case, at the end of exposure,

the totality of the story may impress the viewer R5a more than the simple rebroadcasts in

Channels 1 and 2. For this reason, the analyst must be cautious in his extrapolations; the value of

information may be measured by object count or by a qualitative metric. Applying the analytic

framework enables the researcher to stratify input streams, where his investigation goes then

depends on what the data present in obvious and less overt forms.

Another way to view the discrete outcomes in the messaging table is to correlate

narratives across channels. Do any subjects tend to converge or diverge? Fineness in gradation

can artificially separate like objects. Content analysis when performed on a dynamic flow may

reveal patterns of bias across channel. In such a case, what the receiver ingests is not as diverse

as it appears. Channel 2 may in fact be related to Channel 1 and offer more pointed arguments

that underscore the themes of its counterpart. Programming may mutually reinforce to great

effect. In contrast, Channel 3 may broadcast opposition accounts and touch on a broad spread of

subjects in order to test and discover what resonates. Finally, Channel 4 may be the lone voice

with minimal resources to broadcast and skew to current political debate. The point is that Table

7.1 serves as an archetype for stratifying conceptual flows in order to understand actual flows.

In a final variation, Table 7.1 can also be used to model a mixed signal environment across

receivers. In a pluralist society, the diversity of voice is embraced as a sign of freedom.

Expression should not be unduly constrained and individuals have both right and access to

political speech. In this view, the incremental addition of a voice is reflected in the width of the

transmission lines. More output means a greater need to discriminate at input. Ignoring the

timeline in Table 7.1, assume that four individuals, R1a-R4a, acquire their knowledge

simultaneously but with each tuning in to a different mix as demarcated by viewer and column.

Instead of a single person navigating each column as a set of different news each time period,

now four people each have different news.

Applied this way, it is clear that no one receives all eleven narratives. The only constant

is that all four receive the message from Channel 1. The table now demonstrates a fragmented

level of collective political information. The question is how would differential information

bases play out in deliberation? Political sharing is a facet of democratic life; people find meaning

not only in received wisdom but in conversation in a wide range of life situations over time.

Talking politics is not necessarily an overt political activity that occurs during elections,

canvassing or debates but in informal settings, as well (Gamson 1992). Apprised of both the

theoretical background and possibilities, the political analyst can design a research project that

attempts to model discussion in light of known inputs. Other scholars may focus on different

aspects, for example what motivates and shapes the manner in which people tune into their array

of signals? Regardless of focus, scholars should be concerned with understanding how mixed

flows represent political communications strategy by providers and information processing

conditions for receivers.

PART 2: DISCUSSION OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF A MIXED MESSAGE

ENVIRONMENT FOR POLITICAL DISCOURSE

The structure of communication flows creates environment conditions that parameterize

the possibility of political engagement and discussion. An important attraction of democracy is

that it roots self expression as a natural right and thus levels the playing field of political

discourse. In theory, all members may enter the public sphere, air their grief, demand an

accounting, or seek support for their arguments. The reality is that the production of ideas as well

as their concomitant distribution is a function of access to a network. Understanding the

collective output of these flows enables the political analyst to understand the macro level factors

that affect micro level decisions. The picture painted in Table 7.1 and in earlier examples

highlights the complexity of the political information environment. People contribute to the field

of ideas in their creations and interventions in discourse. As they navigate this dynamic terrain,

they must deal with the signals of likeminded or hostile figures. For a given political topic,

discussion may be friendly but even then, what people bring into their conversation is a function

of their background, training, education, experience and interests as well as their knowledgebase.

A map of potential information flows attempts to control for the inputs that give rise to that base.

Deliberation and progress towards consensus or regression towards polarization are not

necessarily fixed on absolute principles and ideologies. Rather, they may hinge on engagement

and knowing what people think – in the way they receive, absorb, express and redistribute – can

provide context for an analysis of specific cases.

Reviewing Table 7.1, the analyst can start with differential inputs and proceed to explore

the consequences of fragmentation and compartmentalization. How does political discourse play

out in light of what people learn? Given the fact that all members, R1a through R4a receive the

Channel 1 narrative, will that theme emerge as the basis for agreement? How will the parties

reconcile the other narratives, particular those expressed in Channels 3 and 4?

Here one sees the power of a multidimensional matrix of signals that evolve over time.

Table 7.1 can be conceived as a cube rather than as a plane. Citizens interact by virtue of their

membership in a polity. There is any number of possible types of exposure from linear by

channel to fragmented across channel. People may monitor politics closely and regularly or drop

in and out. Thus, in a given grouping, one may find the whole spectrum of receiver types, from

R1 to R1a to R5a. As an archetype, the model assists the political scholar to step through various

ideal types of discursive dilemmas.

How might deliberation ensue if some people operate on thinner ground – for example,

when a party who relies on information from Channel 4’s single broadcast engages someone who

advocates for Channel 1? Mapping the terrain helps outside observers discern the lack of

common context that would unite individuals and make them aware of their common cause. Each

person’s entering dataset differs and this alone can be problematic, setting aside further

complications of comprehensive doctrines or and cognitive styles. When multiple people in the

same space receive conflicting news, discord is more likely than agreement, particularly if people

are hostile to certain sources, regardless of the similarity of the data received.

CHAPTER 8: SINGLE SEQUENCES CREATE THE COMPLEX NETWORK:

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND THE

BYPASS OF CONTROL

Individual linear sequences can now be integrated, unifying authors, speakers, relays and

recipients into one global network. Communications sequences are a dynamic process and

message units move from point to point over time. Information is staggered in its presentation to

downstream actors and across channels. When all elements are combined they give rise to an

elaborate series of parallel and competing intercourses that constitute a complex political

communications system as adumbrated in Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2. Differential exposure

sequences on a micro level can be incorporated into higher level articulations to show how

different actors, politicians and citizens, participate in networks where data flows faster or

slower, sooner or later. Each of these holds consequences in political evaluation. Timeliness can

matter with respect to a speaker’s authority and credibility. Velocity of flow matters because it

reflects directness of speech, immediacy of co-presence and, possibly, the type and motivation of

involved parties. The focus now turns to examine how the analytic model can be applied to a

system of communication.

When competing authors broadcast messages over time, a variety of transmission

impulses are injected into the public sphere. Some may converge others may remain skew.

Signals may arrive synchronously or lagged. Those who relay signals may have competing or

complicated interests that are short or long term and principled or flexible. As a result the

decision to pass on, reject or modify an input signal may depend on their adherence to duty or

contract, commonality or conflict of interest, or other reason. These substantive political

considerations may manifest in concrete political particulars: policy positions, economic

interest, moral standing, political identity and the effect on input will reveal itself in some sort of

changed output. If the analyst incorporates decision points into a linear sequence, the

proliferation of new information and of pass through, branching, and diversion becomes clear.

TABLE 8.1 TYPES OF MESSAGE HANDLING ACTIONS

Event E Author

Message

Political POV Transmitter Choice Targeted

Audience

Iteration

ABCDE All Yes Pass Through All Once

Some No Block Some Multiple

None Edit Few Contingent

Distort Always

Replace

Contextualize

The number of variables gives a clue as to the proliferation potential of a single event. In

the simple case, a complete account is rendered by the author and handed to a transmitter. At this

point, the amplifier serves a gatekeeping function; will he pass it on and if so, how and to whom?

Neutral parties will pass any input transparently but they may also transmit context or their own

reports. Biased parties may block altogether or pass through edited or distorted versions. They

may also replace the input with a new version or provide political context that may be

illuminating or tainted. Partial accounts of the Event E may be rendered with or without an

attached political narrative. These messages are subject to the same set of possibilities at the gate

and may emerge untouched or changed.

For a particular message, there is an intended and an actual audience. Message versions

are not necessarily exclusive; complete versions can be passed through followed by annotated

excerpts and commentary. Parallel and serial programs, political talk shows with their expert

pundits may be streamed before and after conveyed messages and provide context for viewers

and receivers. Who is being reached depends on the channel by issue, time slot and location. In

broadcast formats, daytime differs from night time, prime time and weekend programming. For

web distribution, providers may target selected sites, forums, blogs and authors. Finally, for

any program there is always the element of time to consider. Does the message transit once or is

it recycled? How messages travel over time can be captured in a histogram of activity and these

charts can be used to characterize branches of an information system. Political communication

can thus be made concrete by topic, actor and their pattern in creating new or rehashing old

themes and material.

What are the political implications? Control over discussion, clarity or obfuscation of

message, and timeliness of interaction are but some of the issues. The ideal case for a

speakerreceiver pair is that both parties are privy to an exclusive channel that allows for

confidential communication. The reality of the communications structure is that any recipient of

information can act as a relay or transmission node, obviating the likelihood of containment and

privacy. Moreover, professional intermediaries monitor available input and are likely to

broadcast items of interest, thus causing transmission lines to intersect and mix. Even if two

political speakers begin by addressing separate audiences, it is likely that their messaging will

cross downstream. The complex of linear sequences thus expands from two or more linear, skew

communications to sequences that intersect at some point downstream. In the example, this

occurs at the first reception point, between Receiver 1 and 2, each of whom is a first stage

recipient.

FIGURE 8.2 PARALLEL NARRATIVES OVER TIME

Communication can vary by quality, accuracy, purpose and delivery method. Whatever

the cause and combination, signals move through channels at different speeds. The goal of an

information provider is to report material and significant information, to do so first, with greatest

accuracy and to do it exclusively. Achieving these goals accrues benefits to credibility and

reputation that can foster loyalty or affinity as well as increase audience tracking and audience

size. From a communications standpoint, reliability, credibility and timeliness affect whether

Event E

Sender

1Media 1 Receiver 1

Sender

2Media 2 Receiver 2

Time

people tune in, for how long and if they will do so in the future. In a political information

environment, then, linear sequences compete in increments of time-space programming.

In Figure 8.1, two independent streams report on Event E. Note that there is a lag before

Sender 2 is able to initiate his message stream. In cases of political authority and access to high

risk information, this scenario might represent the delayed response by an opposition speaker

who is informed of news by the primary power holder and is only in a position to react, to both

the event and competitor’s earlier missive. Sender 2’s (S2) sequence operates at a delay and all

actors reliant upon S2 receive their news late. Receiver 2 may even receive her news from both

her own, normal line as well as from a peer, Receiver 1. Why might this matter?

Control over the parameters of political discussion can influence debate. A first-mover

advantage can confer the benefit of gaining the high ground in discourse, control the primary

terms of discourse and cast one side as proactive and innovative, the other side as reactive,

reactionary, and passive. Figure 8.2 encapsulates the first order set of actors but as information

spreads, the nodes are repeated as downstream matrices are introduced to the signal. The

activation of a broad network is the sum of the links that fire and differential activation enables

faster and more reliable conduits to have proportionally greater influence. If certain framed

messages spread quickly, arriving before others, they can set the tone for how people evaluate

political urgency.

In a complex system the role of an intermediary gains greater substance. Authors,

speakers and initiators of message streams need not be properly formal political figures. As news

gathering and information providers, media companies depend on programming. They only exist

if they broadcast. To this end, media entities may deploy resources that enable them to generate

their own message streams that they can broadcast to fill time, to shade existing streams that they

contract to carry and to splice into streams where they deem appropriate. If the ideal is a noble

Fourth Estate that follows the journalistic ethos to provide truthful, independent accounts to the

people, the more politically damaging type is the opportunistic profit driven organization that

views political communication a form of consumption to market to..

In example 8.3, Media Company 2 directly investigates the issue Event E, as indicated by

the dotted line. This fact changes conditions for everyone, political speaker and citizen receiver

alike. Speakers compete across transmission lines, relays are not captive and loyal but

disinterested, antagonistic or concerned for their own channel subscribers. The result is that the

public must deal with a convoluted set of inputs whose origins may be hard to determine.

That being said, the example also covers a more realistic condition of audience type. If

one focuses only on linear sequences, it is possible to think that audiences are segregated since

the feeds are. In fact receivers are proximate to each other and it is speech that attempts to

differentiate them. Some speakers may focus on narrow demographics while others may attempt

to reach everyone.

FIGURE 8.3 FLOWS AND CONNECTED NETWORK SIZE

100

Event E

Sender

1Media 1

Sender

2Media 2

Time

Media 2 Investigates Event=

RA RA1

RB1

RC1

RAB

RBC

RD RD1 RD2

In Figure 8.2, the two senders command different levels of touch. The messaging of

Sender 1 overlaps with Sender 2’s audience due to the use of the intermediary Media 2. This

model features two-way arrows between senders and media companies, which indicates relay

feedback, and adduces multiple receivers linked to each other. The transmissions reach different

audience size in order to compare the consequences of different types of reach and depth.

Scanning the graphic, two prominent features come to mind – the transmission line for

Media 1 is larger in scope and Sender 1 garners first mover advantage and thus all subscribers of

Line 1 get their information before those in Line 2. In fact, if the two audience groups were to

communicate, the set of first recipients RA, RB and RC could inform their counterpart RD prior

to RD learning her news from Media 2. Similarly, the tertiary receiving group in Line 1, RAB

and RBC can speak to RD2 simultaneous with the M2 feed. Interpreted another way, if the

audience began as a unit whole, Line 1 by operating at a higher rate of expansion enables Sender

1 to capture a majority of the population. For this reason, it makes sense for the political analyst

to map contact points as they link people over time because he can then examine the total

coverage of the audience by speaker as well as measure each line’s communication velocity. This

is important because control over presentation is intertwined with provenance and confirmation.

Recall the question – does reception across channels persuade or multiple encounters of the same

message? The nomenclature scheme used in 8.2 aligns a downstream node as suffix to its source.

Thus, RA1 receives from RA, RB1 from RB, and RAB from both RA1 and RB1. For RBC, the

news has arrived from multiple sources and she, along with RC1 can inform RD2. For any of

these latter receivers, how would they reconcile their mix of signals by directness of source and

time arrival? Does this flow model affirm or undermine the possibility of agenda-setting? If there

are multiple streams, it seems unlikely that any one stream will actually hold sway. If a channel

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is to control priorities, what other conditions might it need to meet? Knowing who controls the

network and with what type of contact can shed light on the influence that channel may have on

the basis of presentation dynamics.

The diagram in Figure 8.2 can also be plotted over time. Resource rich senders can

constantly issue new messages never allowing the network to fall silent. There is a side benefit to

this as well; regular programming can instill an expectation in the audience to look for news

from a given source. Since broadcasts are regular, when breaking events occur, the speaker has

both a stable and short path to a ready audience. In contrast, intermittent speakers must cobble

together bandwidth, which if there are critical events transpiring, may be difficult due to the

desire of many to enter public discourse.

The analyst can use this framework to compare performance across authors and

individual types – from politician to corporation to citizen- and assess the disparate capabilities

between them. Wave propagation into the system is asymmetric not only by new authors but also

in intensity, frequency and depth. Some networks are larger and always engaged, others are hard

to reach. Triangulating the possible array of feeds provides a way to control for conditions that

may give rise to top of the head responses (Morris, Lodge et al 2003; Lodge and Taber 2005).

Wave propagation is effective because it can enable deeper penetration of an existing audience

and anyone who comes into contact with that group. Imagine that messages are streamed into a

group; each successive wave reinforces prior themes and creates a baseline of political

knowledge. Over time, this knowledge can become collectively common across the population

and achieve an equilibrium level. Surveys that measure respondent absorption of media input can

be tailored to monitor exposure that is controlled for signal amplitude frequency and branch

length.

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Finally, the diagram can also be used to map content flows. Is there plurality of voice,

independence of intermediary and a comprehensive, accurate accounting present to the people?

Or is there signal convergence given the shared use of the media companies? The analyst

interested in this problem will need to focus on the information feeds themselves and track them

along their sequences to determine whether they emanate from the same viewpoint and baseline

framework. For example, in a strong form argument, if S1=S2 and M1=M2, then content will be

constant and the receptors at the ends of both lines will receive identical signals, indicating

superficial plurality. If signals converge, joint senders exercise uniform control over the

information environment. As political actors seek to leverage appropriate media and touch all

end users as a way of legitimating their political platform, citizens are targeted by whatever

means available. Mapping the relations along with the content flows can provide insight into this

issue.

PART 2: TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSFORMATION: THE RECEIVER BECOMES A

SPEAKER: INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION, LINKED KNOWLEDGE AND NEW

DISCOURSES

The analytic model has so far focused on individuals in their role as receptors. In

topdown mass communications system, the capacity to generate, divert or otherwise intervene in

political communication is highly asymmetric in favor of producers and authority. In contrast,

empowered by a shift to digital production, in today’s globally interconnected network,

individuals can create whole communities as well as intervene in existing speech. Citizens now

have the means to share knowledge, and to collaborate or criticize and to be heard and believed.

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They can do so using a variety of methods with varying frequency and durability. Technology

has changed information interchange and the kinds of linkages between agents. Bit for bit copy

enables transparent reproduction of media while sophisticated imaging and rendering programs

enable both subtle and drastic manipulation. When presented with two products, given the

available tools and richness of content, it is difficult to distinguish between the accomplished

amateur and the for-profit media company. Not only do people speak but they do so in ways that

can command respect, attention and entrain belief. Direct recording and playback provide

citizens a window into actual events as they transpire. These may include the cell phone video,

the sound recording or the publishing of classified government documents. Digital presentation is

direct and broadcast can be broad. To the extent that the truth can be revealed more easily,

technology is a multiplier of provenance.

When individuals share ideas they transform the linear message structure and add nodes

to formal lines of communication. These nodes and their entire sub-graphs lie outside the formal

reach of established authority. Since the power to set the parameters of discussion lies with the

speaker, new categories of speaker, new channels of delivery and new repositories of knowledge

imply parallel networks that can compete with incumbents. The Internet is thus a resource of

pooled, alternate information and one that can be accessed invisibly from anywhere. Recalling

the juxtaposition of agent matrices in figures 6.1 and 6.2, the fact is that the asymmetry of

speaker to audience, the limited set of political voices and channels to the masses is now

inverted. When pipelines to reach the multitudes have high barriers of entry in capital, authority

or other limited resource, those who originate and provide information control discussion. The

inversion occurs when the masses themselves have the means to exchange ideas, not only to

power, but amongst each other. Whole categories of issues, whole classes of sociopolitical

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identity, and a whole distribution system of knowledge exists between actors who lie outside of

formal channels of monitoring and control.

Technology affects link-up and changes the importance of timing since synchronizing

accounts can be scheduled and deferred. Information is now served – it resides on platforms that

can be set to deliver based on push or pull models. People can choose to subscribe to news feeds

according to their granular interests and particular schedules. The formality of a push model

intrinsic to top-down mass communications systems are replaced with end user choice in the

manner of accession. Flows can bypass formal channels and their gatekeeping function. Thus, the

power of speech resides between the masses themselves, who can rely on the capacity of their

members to share the truth directly. The problem of the average distance to events for the

citizenry as a whole is altered by the ability of any one member to interrupt news flow with

genuine, incorrigible evidence that can be beamed broadly, rapidly, and frequently. The

geometric expansion of voice is not a problem for the speaker to activate node multiplication so

much as representation of the potential standing mass of citizen-based discourse. Add to this the

reservoir aspect of the digital cloud. The storing and delivery of digital data are easily scaled.

There is no practical limit save time and effort for the amount of data in digital kilobytes, that

people can contribute, wrong or right, accurately or not, to the collective store. This store is not

only the messaging of current political authorities but the sum of knowledge over time, the

civilization output that can be made relevant given the right user, time and place. Examples

include books, video, papers, audio, art and other objects that represent the possible spaces, some

of which have passed forever yet can be studied, others of which may be implemented again. The

practical imagination of politics resides in discerning the essential idea found in such containers

that can be rewrapped and used in the political environment today. For democracy,

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virtual communication enables individuals with direct access to politically relevant issues to

speak truth directly in public. It also allows minority voices to reach audiences across spaces that

could not otherwise be bridged due to lack of access to formal modes of communication. Digital

distribution and replication can be instantaneous and news can saturate a network immediately.

Copies of news and information can be stored on local hosts – mobile phones, computers, tablets

– and then taken offline. The velocity of signal lock and the ease of duplication pose threats to

authoritative control and censorship. In the absence of means to contain nodes on a network,

government may resort to coarse censorship of whole categories of data – as occurs in the digital

spaces of closed societies. While beyond the scope of this thesis, the analytic model can be

applied to test comparative flows of information for topic type and text strings as a way of

measuring information openness using computational methods.

The success in speaking to power using its own devices is perhaps best exemplified by

the case of WikiLeaks. The behavior of government is revealed directly to the public, raising new

issues about privacy, security, the definition and role of journalism, journalists and sources.

Issues once ignored can be raised among diaspora interest groups who then find each other

online. The critical change is in the sequence of transmissions – they no longer expire in time but

can be held and served to many from a digital cloud of objects that is constituted and activated

by users who upload and download. The rise of the blogosphere and independent political

observers and analysts in regimes throughout the world speaks to the potential of citizens to

comment about and in some cases, speak the truth, to their fellow citizens and to power. These

voices stand outside the control of the formal transmission chain and the messaging they inject

into the information environment can stand out as much for quantity, penetration, and focus as

for veracity and persuasiveness.

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Ubiquitous digital interconnection trivializes the problem of physical distance and time

constraint that once enabled control over the reporting of politically relevant events by central or

monolithic entities. Today, recording devices and always-on network connections empower the

average citizen to intervene in the public forum. The novelty of a digital interconnected public

sphere is not only that people who could not access distribution can now engage but that

interaction and interchange can be direct on a one-to-many or many-to-many level and it can

occur in real time as well as in time-shifted increments. Technology has shortened latency,

immediacy and audience reach as well as the ability to suppress news, good or bad, right or

wrong. Errors can be broadcast and even if caught, they cannot be stopped. The only resort is to

issue new signals with retractions. The same capacity of replication means that without

comprehensive culling, factually incorrect news and reference material may persist and future

users may stumble across such items and mistakenly re-inject them into discourse. Or perhaps

this is also the point of “new” political communication – the static nature of digital repositories

enable clever misuse and misinformation and sub-branches of an information network may serve

as testing grounds for tilted messaging.

The world of digital interconnection does not mean that all speech is direct. On the one

hand, the analyst might examine authors for their direct interventions in speech – in blogs,

columns and interviews. On the other hand, he might also look to the use of new, digital media

intermediaries. As co-constituted entity, the Internet should cause the political analyst to

reexamine the linkages of political communication for speaker access, speaker type, message

type and delivery mechanism. Changes to these assets implies changes to information flows -

the gates and relays and their distortion effects and the velocity and touch of content

distributions. What if speakers, of any stripe and provenance, can create a platform and begin to

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beam their voice? The first benefit is that such actors sidestep the problem of distortion,

corruption and noise. Digital stasis enables linkups that can be manipulated in time yet remain

direct. When parties to a signal stream are present online, they can confer, interact, and debate.

Digital networks thus demand that the analyst account for the velocity of flow. There can be zero

time lag to a mass audience with web postings, Twitter feeds, Facebook updates and other time

sensitive applications. Time lag is no longer linked to touch – the nature of digital feeds allows

for customized delivery.

PART 3: TWO SIDES TO POLITICAL ANALYSIS: A MAP OF SEQUENCES, DENSITIES

AND FLOWS

A top down conception formalizes political information flows from authority to the

public which may be handled by intermediaries. The top portion of figure 8.4 captures the

dynamic of competing politicians using an array of media companies to reach different

audiences. Note the difference in audience size, the interconnection between audiences and also

between politicians and media companies. The distance between the citizenry and the issue is at

least two steps and thus the people are dependent on others for their reports. The truth is not

accessible directly. But there is hope – the lone voice of truth in Mill’s conception is found in the

marginalized branch. This speaker is herself a witness and can provide testimony to those around

her. The distance between a citizen witness and another citizen is short and there is no mediation

and thus no problem of carrier distortion or noise. The public stands to benefit from a direct path

to truth. Of a sudden, the massive networks and pipelines that beam signal are bypassed. Yet a

question remains – even if the citizen witness offers incontrovertible truth, will her voice be

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heard in the cacophony of noise? The graph offers insight into the challenges – not only for the

number of nodes she must confront but also the distances.

FIGURE 8.4 FLOW, BRANCHING AND NETWORK LOCATION

Interlocking Information Flows and False Plurality

To understand the possibility of speech in a digital age, it is important to understand the

baseline argument. There are two primary questions – does anyone control the network and is

media effective? The latter has garnered the bulk of research attention since Lippman and

Lasswell through Lazarsfeld, McCombs, Zaller and Entman. If media are effective, then control

demands study; if media effects are minimal, research can focus on other phenomena and agents.

A map may reveal dense interconnectedness between authors and transmitters. Formal political

authority may be consolidated en bloc with select intermediaries revealing an interlocking

directorate of elite rule (Michels 1999; Schumpeter 1987; Domhoff 2010). The key linkage is

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Issue 1

Politician

LMedia 1

Politician

RMedia 2

Politician

TMedia 3

Time

Citizen

Citizen Citizen

Citizen

Witness Citizen Citizen

Marginalized Branch

between authors and mediators– if messages are unified, whatever follows simply flows from

limited viewpoints. The fact that the multiple intermediaries exist does not imply plurality,

especially since they too are linked directly. When political authorities collude against the

masses, the chances for an individual voice to emerge that can persuade other citizens in the face

of cohesive structural resistance are slim if information flow is restricted.

A map is helpful to the extent that it enables one to navigate. It can also be interpreted as

a map of the elements’ link densities. Tracing the signal flows in Figure 8.4 will lead the analyst

to focus on directionality and control. The front section reveals a potential unified front. But the

latter half show linked citizens. If the branches under “Marginalized branch” can be activated,

Figure 8.4 can be recast as two bulwarks, one formal, the other citizen with minor linkages

between them. Instead of one to many and one-way, Figure 8.4 reveals two categories, authority

attempting to impress their information on citizens and citizens acting on their own. If one

rotates a communication network by focusing on a different center-point, the analyst may find

new insight into the environmental conditions for a given actor. Figure 8.5 re-images the

marginalized branch as a hub-spoke embedded in an information environment that has multiple

political agents transmitting. These signals influence the basket of available ideas and the

information that people around the citizen witness have.

FIGURE 8.5 INDIVIDUAL STREAMS EMBEDDED, NOT ISOLATED

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Without technology, a citizen can only reach so many people. The nodes she can activate

are small compared to those that are being saturated by the ongoing actions of politicians,

journalists and critics. In example 8.4, the citizen witness is embedded in an environment where

information feeds are correlated to other end users and indicated by their color. The density of

connections is determined by the number of nodes and their closeness and the bias in political

knowledge or lack thereof is indicated by the coloring. As mentioned earlier, truth is not enough

– the quality and characteristics of a network play an important role in determining what prevails

in a given political system. A knowledgebase acts not only as a springboard for a person to

understand the world but also as a bulwark against new information. The coloring of the diamond

citizen nodes can be elaborated further by using different intensities shade and hue to show the

flexibility of staunchness of a knowledge firmament.

For the analyst, it is not enough to describe the distribution; as an outcome of political

communication, embedded knowledge is the product of message sequences as well as life

experience, education, indoctrination and other learning. What role does political communicative

action play for a given distribution defined by time, person and place? The manner in which data

stream and course through channels populated by people may reveal these mechanisms. A

framework that tackles data directly provides a counterpart to inferential methods.

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Digital empowerment offers hope simply because it shortens the path any person has to

reach the truth. News can travel in real time and can be moved on by individuals; thus speakers

do not need to carry the full load to touch a group. Indeed, this is a key turning point in the

distribution of information. The power of information science is that concrete expressions can be

analyzed and findings can then be linked back to actors and to the channels they populate.

Researchers will need to develop new methods to handle the presentation of information streams

online. In physical media, time is understood in terms of hours, days and weeks. Newspapers

publish daily, magazines weekly or monthly. Production focuses on these schedules and the

durability of a message contained in these formats is invariably linked to the medium. Radio and

television broadcasts also operate in time chunks; airtime needs to be filled or go unused.

Tangible production processes enable easier control over idea dissemination, which is an

important step in controlling an agenda and the arguments that can enter discourse. Conversely, to

speak online is to have potential access to a large piece of the network. Individuals possess

disruptive power. They can copy and distort the messages of others with subtlety, blending

nuanced variants with the original. The lone voice is thus given access to the broad audience. This

capacity fractures an existing control structure since the information environment can be

constituted by non-formal and even hitherto unknown agents. Unexpected entries into the digital

public sphere disrupt and compete with the unified flow of a mass communications, and provide a

platform and space for people who are otherwise far flung or disconnected to collaborate,

organize and advocate for once marginal issues, policies and philosophies. Finding space where

others may watch, listen or read is a way to signal others to a common cause. If the citizen

speaker can upload her evidence and arguments for wide consumption via digital distribution, it

can be remarked, referred, forwarded, pinned, notated and copied in real time and in original

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form, allowing for direct evaluation by distant viewers. The process of vetting can occur quickly

and the truth can be triangulated by the people.

This brings up another important watershed in political communication – the emergence

of true bi-directionality in speech. Commentary threads, referrals, recommendations and

downloads reveal the collaborative nature of information production and sharing. The nature of

the hosting device and the settings of the provider determine the level of interaction. In mass

systems, flow is unitary and blind to reception. In the connected world, engagement is immediate

and speakers can be exposed directly to criticism, if not as a direct response but to others. One

need not talk back to be heard. Speaking to power is not only to engage one’s interlocutor but

also to speak to others about the speaker. In this way, people can form grassroots communities to

critique, deliberate, chastise or support.

Simultaneous multi-actor engagement in a common thread captures social networks in

action. Rather than depend on delivered knowledge, actors can contribute what they know and

build an independent asset base. These services exist for consumption – the Yelp review service

standing as a stellar example of populism delivering a valuable service. Can they succeed in

political domains? The answer lies in another feature of Web co-creation – the use of avatars and

their shield of anonymity. There are no restrictions on access and self-identification. The ideal of

rhetoric holds that argument should prevail on the merits only this clashes with the reality that if

anyone can contribute, regardless of veracity, clarity or social value, Web-based information can

quickly become mired in an irretrievable mix of fact, opinion, argument and vanity. Speech

without accountability is not a problem if the means of intervention are difficult, as was the case

in the pre-industrial era. Unfettered speech into a political system, however, only muddies the

picture for everyone. For collaboration to succeed, respect for deliberation and the truth is

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necessary. A concomitant for this is to be willing to endure criticism and to interact as individuals

who will not disappear never to reappear or to only re-emerge under a new identity. Anonymity

can promote honesty but it can also incentivize deliberate malfeasance. Whereas individuals may

screen formal channels by affinity or dislike, they may not be as careful with personal social

networks. What if political speakers attempt to manipulate these branches through the use of

surrogates, proxies and embedded agents? Reviewing Figure 8.5, the strategy might be to expand

from a seed planted within the gray area rather than attack from without. Whereas broadcast and

print systems are easily identified, the flexible authorship of digital discourse can also be a boon

to strategic instigators.

If online speech is to improve democratic discussion, perhaps political scientists can

contribute to the cause. Equipped with a guide to understanding information flows, the next step

is to investigate empirical manifestations. Online data differ from broadcast and print media in a

variety of ways. The model developed here will need to be extended and operationalized. One

area of focus concerns the structure of search and the tendency to drive traffic to fewer, dominant

websites (Hindman 2009). The analytic model provides another possibility. Private service

providers such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook gather an incredible amount of detail about the

online behavior of users. The discursive interventions - thread comments, postings – can be

supplemented with knowledge about what one reads, prints, downloads or refers. A challenge for

academics is finding ways to gain access to or generate similar data. The availability of such a

resource can then be used in conjunction with computational content analysis of text

contributions. Such a study would provide deeper insight into the information input and output of

individuals based on action rather than survey. The path people blaze through digital space can

then be mined and compared. Whether this can be accomplished is a task left for another day.

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What matters is that implemented properly, digital knowledge creation and sharing undermine

control and augurs hope for genuine democratic oversight.

CHAPTER 9: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

This project began with a puzzle – how has political communication changed in an era of

digital interconnectedness and how can political scientists best study the phenomenon? Out of

expedience and habit, one might adapt existing methods and use the Internet to extend research

using conventional assumptions. To do so, however, would be to miss a sea change

transformation in the actors, objects and relations that have been put into play by digital

technology and platforms. Anyone with Internet access can intervene in the public sphere with

true or false information. People can comment, interject, and post in both real- and lapsed time.

The digital cloud implicates a complex model of time synchronicity for idea exchange that

enables simultaneous and lagged signal reception. In order to properly analyze the

multidirectional, time-stretching information flows one must first step away from theories that

center on substantive actors, concrete institutions and their observable relationships and instead

appreciate the interactive, dynamic nature of communication as a flow of information by and

from actors in channels to and through other actors. A first step is to understand the basic

components of messaging – the actors, objects and activities. Knowledge of the underlying linear

sequence can then be used to examine networked systems of expression. By thinking in terms of

transmission, signaling, amplification, reception, conveyance, and time synchronicity, the

political scientist can then confront the vast amount of Internet data with a framework that can

organize research into discrete and manageable components.

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The Internet mirrors the information flows that connect people and their ideas in an

information environment. Digital communication is a challenge to study due to the huge numbers

of actors and exponential growth in content. Systems of communication and the people who are

implicated can, however, be understood if one focuses on particular relationships and specific

action. The framework offered here provides a means to analyze both micro and macro level

detail and to develop new research goals returned by new methods. Thus, analysis can be

extended beyond static content analysis or time-lagged, inferential absorption measurement to

dynamic content handling, network node firing and signal processing evaluation.

In order to understand the politics of communication, one must first understand how the

basic components of communication, senders, receivers and their signal transmission sequences,

delimit the parameters of political strategy. Using an information flow paradigm, the analyst can

then investigate contextualized expressive behavior – how people create, amplify or distort

messaging in networked sequences of information. Proposed in two parts, the theory first defines

components of the linear sequence of message transmission in order to investigate the nature of

the relation between speakers and hearers and provide context for understanding how and why

intermediaries and amplification devices are used. Building up from the basic model, the thesis

then adds complexity, by introducing multiple senders, receivers, message streams, and

intermediaries in order to work towards a more complete analysis of a realistic, signal-rich

environment that better replicates the public sphere.

Action is simplified into a basic linear sequence of transmission between a sender and a

receiver and care is given to analyze the conditions of message production, distribution and

reception. For a flow model, what matters is the connecting of agents because these segments can

be replicated and expanded to account for the activity and interlinks of a system of message

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propagation. How a signal operates, the manner in which it transits as well as the conditions

carrier agents face, affects the success or failure of communication. What matters is exchange

and dynamic carriage – the study of public expression in the context of people as they speak, to

whom they speak. In contrast, theories that attempt to explain the reality of newspapers,

television and radio invariably focus on substantive aspects of production and dissemination that

may obscure awareness of actual signal distribution. If one conceives of broadcasts as monolithic

entities the distance between issuer and receiver is reduced to one step, thus occluding insight

into the actual propagation of a narrative. Moreover, analysts may naturally focus on message

absorption because there are no other actors and actions to investigate. In a digital age, however,

political speech is not constrained to uniform, unidirectional movement from a limited set of

authors to mass publics and researchers must anticipate the ways in which discourse actually

flies about in the public sphere.

Rather than accept media organizations as given, the thesis asks what purpose they serve.

When people are separated by time and space, speakers may resort to some form of

amplification, either as mechanical enhancement or proxy speaker. What are the ideal type uses

and costs of amplification? The framework delineates the various types of amplification and

sheds light on how and why speakers develop particular signaling strategies. Perhaps speakers

seek to expand their reach to audiences beyond their core appeal or existing distribution

channels. They can turn to intermediaries who possess certain kinds of bandwidth and audience

touch. Or speakers may worry about signal quality – the frequency and duration of their message

streams – and seek providers who can help to saturate distal audiences who may have fragmented

reception habits. Whatever the reason, there are returns and costs, the most significant of which

may be control over one’s message. Using signal transmission and network terminology,

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whenever a node is interposed into a process, messages streams are subject to interference. When

messages are streamed into digital space, political analysts have the opportunity, given the right

techniques and data access, to trace signal flow downstream. Using the framework, he can begin

to track narratives as they change due to handling and evaluate agents for their contribution and

deterioration of the signal in terms of fidelity, noise and distortion. Operating directly on

expressive action, the analyst can begin to characterize how people constitute their information

environment.

At the same time, signal transmissions are not unconstrained. Speakers face limits not

only in voice projection but also in narrative manipulation. When there are multiple channels

external sources temper the importance and credibility of any one speaker. Multiple signals

provide ways to differentiate, confirm or repudiate received narratives. What about single stream

environments as may obtain in authoritarian regimes? The framework shows that time itself

constrains authorial intent by creating reputation and consistency benchmarks. Speakers need to

treat thematic material the same way over time since departures from established narratives can

diminish his credibility and if prolonged, even his authority due to inconsistency and

unreliability. For this reason, analysts must find ways to track political messaging over time. If

the analyst can track and organize mixed signals with changing messages over team, he can then

test for agenda-setting effects under a realistic information matrix and provide a better account of

individual information processing on the basis of knowing both input and output.

There remains another question. Why should the public sphere become filled with so

many voices? Why do multiple providers seek to signal on the same issue and why should one

speaker wish to use multiple platforms to reiterate a single story? The answer can be found in the

manner in which messages are created from reference events and ideational building blocks.

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Speakers shape what others know about the world and condition the public’s sense of what is

true and false. Political motivations shape the construct of messages and competitors vying for

favor may blend truth, analysis and opinion into persuasive arguments that score well for

political effectiveness rather than truthfulness. For any given issue or event, there is a limited set

of facts and a relevant set of analyses. A political author drafts a message with components

chosen based on some decision process. These may include personal political beliefs,

apprehension of what competitors are doing, a sense of what targeted constituents desire, and an

appraisal of the transmitters he has available. Given that competitors, commentators and

eyewitnesses have a different set of priorities competing accounts are a given. When signals are

transmitted, some actors may choose to speak in parallel; others may opt for a different tack and

choose to manipulate the original signal to their own ends. If no account is complete, any

account can be entertained. Shadings and omissions in message constructions provide

opportunity for new entrants to fill in empty spaces. Thus one story can give rise to multiple

accounts and one storyline can be manipulated into multiple versions downstream. By examining

the granular analysis of message possibilities, the framework provides a functional way to define

changes, especially patterned bias such as gatekeeping, coverage and statement bias. The type of

change – the content, the semantic inflection, and the terms and arguments themselves can reveal

the political behavior of that node. In the information age, scholars must seek to analyze what a

person says rather than settle for asking a respondent what she says she said. Content analysis is

thus advanced from static snapshots of monolithic actors – the President, Fox News, the New

York Times – and public opinion media polls, to a paradigm of expression in action. Since

democratic legitimacy hinges on information transparency, if researchers can measure important

drivers of public sphere discussion as they appear on the Web, they can provide insight into the

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political communicative behavior of people individually and of the branches in which they are

embedded.

How might one measure change? Conceptually, one can start with an original message

object and follow its dissemination. There are two categories of change, noise and distortion.

Channels used to distribute missives may be flawed and agents who receive may deliberately

transform signal from input to output. With noise, downstream receivers face the burden of

filtering spurious elements from the true message and noisy channels may cause people to turn

off or tune out. Cognizant of this fact, speakers concerned with incomplete reception may

augment their broadcasts to ensure blanketing and fill in any gaps in knowledge. When all

speakers resort to this, multitude pipelines can result in a cacophony of repeating signals. In other

situations, people may actively distort a message by adding elements and analysis or deleting or

parsing for special effect.

As a system of information flows, understanding who carriers what to whom and when

can also reveal much about the political workings of a society. When a message is sent, which

branches relay and how does a message get spread and to which audiences and constituencies? Is

broadcast blind or can the analyst discern the deliberate use of conduits which are known to

exaggerate or tap narrow demographics? Applying the framework to channel propagation can

return added detail about the assets that certain actors have at their disposal. When candidate X

speaks, who responds and who carries on the message? Flows connect speaker to base and study

of the pipeline rather than the keywords can deliver more nuanced understanding of the

mechanics of political messaging.

Finally, the thesis avers that the capacity of an information network depends on its

technological base. Atomistic digital data sharing is a bellwether variable that modern theories of

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political communication must apprehend. Changes in technology create viable new categories of

actors and instantiate a multi-directional, time-peculiar flow of information that at once

accentuates, at once diminishes the importance of synchronicity for signal connection. The

amount of information that can be moved, its speed, and the number of people who touch and

can be touched are related to distribution mechanism. A newspaper can reach many people daily

but the physical paper cannot be shared widely. Television and radio may reach a vast audience

but messaging requires reception and the ephemeral nature of programming makes shared

experience difficult. In contrast, digital technologies have low barriers to access, sharing and

commentary. Cloud provisioning lets average individuals learn more and do more. People now

have generative capability and a potentially direct access to large, distant audiences. Shared

personal networks means that individuals may have greater influence over public discussions. In

politics, this capacity may be best exemplified by the Millian lone voice that can sway public

discussion on the basis of a transcendental truth that achieves it potential through Web-based

channels that bypass the gated limitations of traditional media.

This has repercussions for political practice and democratic governance. In theory, a

citizen can be an eyewitness for all the people. As technology has evolved, barriers to broad

dissemination have receded and people can contribute to distal audiences for better or for worse.

Multidirectional speech speaks to the empowerment of individuals to contribute and intervene in

political discourse. Formal political communications streams now operate around and in

conjunction with self-authored and self-directing news feeds. People can learn from one another

and marginalize monolithic mass communications systems. The lone voice of truth can reach

mass publics with one degree of separation – witness the power of cell phone recordings of

police brutality e.g. Rodney King, or leaked emails of government entities e.g. WikiLeaks. The

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people have the means to confront unadulterated fact for themselves, to access pertinent

information and thus deliberate with material information.

The potential of the Internet is that as a reified digital public sphere, political scientists

can now pursue new avenues of inquiry. As people express themselves, in original and handled

messaging, they reveal a dynamic of political behavior. Equipped with a framework for studying

collective information flows, the analyst can compare the flow of formal and informal

communications. The flow of accurate and inaccurate information, whether substantive or

analytic, reflects the knowledgebase and behavioral characteristic of a political system. What is

the level of transparency in reporting and analysis? Do people demand truth and accountability

or do they themselves contribute distortion? The Internet instantiates a realm of instant

communicative action, one that affords great transmission and amplification potential to those

with access. Political scientists can work to illuminate the decision choices actors make as they

interact in information streams. The chaotic and unbounded nature of digital explosion is

everywhere. The information flow framework developed here can enable scholars to innovate to

develop new models and tools and embark on projects that explore the digital constitution of the

political information environment. Analysts can devise ways to capture the linkages between

people as they blog, comment on articles, contribute to forum threads or forward and editorialize

another sender’s original content.

NEXT STEPS FOR RESEARCH

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The next step is to develop an operationalized application of the analytic framework.

There are two basic paths: one might translate existing research into an information flow model,

using a digital platform to host and measure an experiment. Another tack might be to use

information flow models to adapt existing computational and data mining techniques. The former

is covered in detail here as a roadmap for our short-term research goals. The adaptation of

existing informatics methods is reviewed in the appendix that follows.

What if we were to transpose the agenda-setting experiment to a multiple transmission

sequence model? For this task, we are interested in moving from the original single-stream,

single exposure pairing of a Sender and Receiver with a fixed Message object transmission to

one that is more complex and realistic. In part one, we control for signal and channel count. We

accomplish this by introducing multiple streams, or horizontal amplification, and multiple

messages, or competitive parallel messaging. We can examine each scenario as well as the

combination of the two. This provides a rich, possibly noisy signal field for reception. The

question is how will we study respondent exposure? We might control programming completely

and measure effect, following the agenda-setting paradigm, or we might instead offer user choice

and enable respondents to sequence and view the message elements. How people sequence will

itself reveal priorities and depending on design requirements, we can control for full or selective

exposure and test for selection bias or sum exposure effect.

We can accomplish more though. The pace of development in digital social networks

evinces the power people have to message to personal yet shareable networks and we must find a

way to examine communicative behavior. Part two of our research design would be to test this

capacity. We introduce downstream segments – the erstwhile respondent is also asked to be a

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transmitter. With the advent of a signal chain, we now have two more variables to control for –

time and downstream receiving targets. With the proper parameters, we can create a message

sequence that respondents perpetuate. How they perpetuate it, the receivers they target and the

content they pass is dynamic political communication. While beyond the scope of this paper, an

important issue to resolve is choosing or developing the appropriate digital platform for

implementation.

What follows is a summary of how the research might proceed. The first step is to design

the experiment in information flow terms. Using notation, an agenda-setting experiment follows

the form:

9.1 AGENDA SETTING IN OBJECT TERMS

Program = | Broadcast Segments

Segment = Message Mn

Message M1 = Aaa

M2 = Bb

M3 = C

Program = | M1 + M2 + M3

A program is comprised of broadcast segments that are essentially message objects,

which in turn are comprised of elements. In the example messages have the form M=A, where

messages are drawn from the set ABC. Assume that elements token counts represent their

weights, thus Aaa>Bb>C. The transmission sequence is the stream of messages M1+M2+M3.

A pre-survey is given examining the respondent’s prior beliefs and ranks for the issues that will

be covered in the transmission. Restricting extraneous information input, the researcher exposes

the respondent to the program. This can be depicted as:

9.2 EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN OF AGENDA SETTING

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Pre - Survey Rank elements A B C: , ,

Aaa + Bb + C

Sender Respondent

Post - Survey: Rank elements A B C, ,

A respondent affected by agenda setting will rank priorities according to the message

weights. There are a number of questions. Is this is a function of learning or manipulation? Or is

the exposure too narrow and time-limited to enable generalization? Notation shows how sparse

the information field is and how communication is only unidirectional. Given this setup, the only

measure available is absorption. We aver that communicative action is a form of political

expression. This can include selection of information to receive, which is the passive, reactive

end of a transmission as well as the expressive, proactive side, which is output.

Before discussing user handling and re-transmission, we elaborate on the bandwidth of

the initial exposure period. Instead of a single transmission, we can extend the exposure

horizontally and create a message matrix. Multiple message streams can be the product of one

sender transmitting on three channels or three speakers transmitting in parallel.

9.3 HORIZONTAL AMPLIFICATION DEFINED

Horizontal Amplification

ChannelChannel 13AaaBb _bbbb`bbbbaReceiver

Channel 2

In Figure 9.3, three channels broadcast three different messages. Depending on the

variables being investigated, the researcher may wish to control for sequence of exposure, to

ensure that order of presentation is not significant. On the other hand, we might also test for

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manipulation schemes and embed elements with different weights throughout a transmission to

see if location makes a difference in respondent apprehension.

How will a respondent rate the elements? The researcher can design different types of

scenarios to test message amplification, controlling for uniform or varied messages across the

channels and choosing to label or not label the channels with the name of some media company

in order to test for hostile media response.

9.4 COMPETITIVE, PARALLEL INFORMATION FLOWS DEFINED

Competitive Parallel Flow,

SenderSenderSender 123 AaaBb _bbbb`bbbbaReceiver

Figure 9.4 captures a competitive landscape. Here the senders differ. This design is well

suited to test for hostile or friendly media bias on the basis of respondent knowledge of the

source. Keeping the transmissions constant, one might compare signal reception and exposure

using a combination of political provenance tags that include liberal, conservative, journalist and

citizen eyewitness. What information is viewed and which accounts are rated true and ranked

highly? Does Mill’s lone voice gain traction?

There are other tests as well. Applying our framework, we can manipulate message types

and weights to test for corroboration or disconfirmation by overlapping channels, such that there

is false plurality or false polarization. By understanding the underlying communications process,

we are equipped to design numerous research permutations.

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The next, important step is to transform the net receiver into a producer. Figure 9.5

incorporates two more variables in dynamic linked expression. A two segment linear sequence

instantiates time lapse and the additional transmission sequence denotes a new message object

that is passed from R1 to Rn.

9.5 DYNAMIC EXPRESSION METRIC

Conveyed Dynamic Expression

Sender1 Aaa R1 ? Rn

The question mark in the downstream sequence is the test variable. What does R1

convey? Is it a perfect copy of Aaa, a changed form, or something altogether different? Is there

distortion or noise? To investigate these possibilities, we will need to design the experiment in

such a way as to allow for message parsing, addition and change. Abridgment may be the easiest

to implement. Given a set of elements, which ones are forwarded? While beyond the scope of

this paper, there are methods to enable respondents to editorialize, express “Like” or “Dislike”,

or choose to link forward/delete with a political content-approval condition. These can provide

added insight into the decision process, and if tagged to the object being sent, can also act as

communicative qualifier that the downstream receiver will view.

In Figure 9.5 we deliberately define the downstream receiver as Rn. This is done to imply

that there may be many other downstream targets. An elaborate research design might focus less

on content manipulation and more on network activation. Given a choice of targets, who does the

respondent pass her message onto? In one version, we might populate test subjects as net

receivers and receiver-transmitters and then test for blind versus known sourcing. Will terminal

respondents rate news received from receiver-respondents favorably versus those received

directly? This last approach is our version of a public opinion collective judgment study (Mutz

1998).

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In order to properly devise a study of a terrain filled with new actors, relationships and

action potentials, it is vital to possess an optics that can guide research. We argue that an

information flow model for studying linked dynamic expressive behavior can provide such a

framework. Although the examples offered here illustrate the possibilities, there remain technical

hurdles. We can, as political scientists, drive forward the development of methodologies if we

adopt an engineering spirit. We do not need to restrict our methods to search engine inquiry,

information retrieval techniques or surveys. The power of the Internet is that we can implement

digital platforms and hosted technologies. While there remains much work ahead, our framework

provides a clear template that will enable us to shape that future.

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THE INTERNET, POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW INFORMATION PARADIGM

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