社交网络与大众传媒外文文献翻译

文献出处：大卫.希格尔.社交网络和大众传媒[J].美国政治学评论, 2013, 107(04): 786-805.

Social Networks and the Mass Media

SIEGEL, DAVID

Abstract:

How do global sources of information such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, NGOs, and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior? Prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. By explicitly modeling this interaction, I show that social network structure conditions media's impact. Empirical studies of media effects that fail to consider this risk bias. Further, social network interactions can amplify media bias, leading to large swings in aggregate behavior made more severe when individuals can select into media matching their preferences. Countervailing media outlets and social elites with unified preferences can mitigate the effect of bias; however, media outlets promulgating antistatic quo bias have an advantage. Theoretical results such as these generate numerous testable hypotheses; I provide guidelines for deriving and testing hypotheses from the model and discuss several such hypotheses.

The author thanks Jason Barabas, Jon Bendor, Ted Carmines, Jamie Druckman, John Freeman, Matt Golder, Sona Golder, Bob Jackson, Jenn Jerit, Kris Kanthak, ?zge Kemahlioglu, Charlotte Lee, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, Adam Meirowitz, Scott McClurg, Will Moore, Chris Reenock, John Ryan, John Scholz, Jake Shapiro, Anand Sokhey, Jeff Staton, Jim Stimson, Craig Volden, Jon Woon, four very helpful anonymous reviewers, and audiences in the Political Economics group at the Stanford GSB, Political Science departments at FSU, GWU, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, and Stony Brook, and the Frank Batten School of

Leadership and Public Policy at UVa. Any errors are my own.

To begin to answer this question, I develop a novel theory of aggregate opinion and behavior. The theory considers a heterogeneous population of individuals who must choose between dichotomous options. It incorporates the interaction of social network and mass media influences at the individual level; its key assumption is that the more others choose an option, the more one is apt to do so as well. In the theory, social networks provide information about the choices of those to whom one is directly connected, while the mass media provide (potentially biased) information about aggregate choice. The theory thus applies to, for example, voter turnout and political participation (e.g., Gerber, Green, and Larimer 2008; Lake and Huckfeldt 1998; Leighley 1990; McClurg 2003; Rolfe 2012), opinion formation (e.g., Beck et al. 2002; Druckman and Nelson 2003; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995), protests and social movements (e.g., Kuran 1991; McAdam 1986), and vote choice (e.g., Beck 2002; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995; Ryan 2011; Sinclair 2012; Sokhey and McClurg 2012).

Three major results follow from this theory. All hold both when individuals treat media identically and when they select into media in line with their preferences. First, understanding the aggregate effect of the media generally requires considering social networks, because social network structure conditions media's impact. For example, additional weak ties between disparate social groups can reduce the media's impact, and the presence of unified social elites can eliminate the media's impact entirely in the aggregate. Empirical studies of media impact that fail to consider media's interaction with social networks risk bias.

Second, social networks can amplify the effect of media bias. A biased media outlet that systematically under- or over-reports a poll of the population by a only a few percentage points can in some cases swing aggregate behavior (e.g., turnout or vote share) by over 20% in either direction due to positive

feedback within the network. Open advocates in the media can have a yet larger impact even when not comparatively influential. Unified social elites limit the effect of media bias, but cannot fully counter an advocate; selection into media, made ever easier with technological improvements, tends to enhance the effect of bias. We should therefore expect media bias to become increasingly important to aggregate behavior.

AN INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL THEORY OF AGGREGATE BEHAVIOR Though I present a theory of aggregate behavior, it is based on individual-level assumptions informed by what we know about the way personal characteristics, social networks, and mass media outlets affect individual behavior. Due to this, the theory can explore the effect that interactions between these three factors have on aggregate behavior. As importantly, the theory incorporates empirically realistic heterogeneity across people in all three factors.

Additionally, people are exposed to individuals, groups, and organizations external to one's network, such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, national party leaders, NGOs, and Internet personalities. These outlets can provide information, increasing political knowledge.

As this small sampling of large literatures indicates, individuals' decisions are influenced by the information they obtain via both local social networks and global media outlets. However, comparatively little scholarship has explored the three-way interaction of personal characteristics, social networks, and media

In the second type of bias, which I call advocacy, the media outlet simply states a preference for one of the options, providing no information about aggregate support. The goal in advocacy is to sway the population toward one or the other option. As before, many goals could underlie advocacy beyond just the support of a biased media outlet's preferences. Advocacy represents the editorial power of the media or the influence of an external actor; it is a \model (Zaller 1992).

I focus my analysis in all three sections on the case in which one of the two options is the status quo, and all individuals begin supporting it. For political participation and social movements, the status quo is not participating. For opinion formation and vote choice, the status quo is an existing option such as a policy in place or an incumbent politician, as contrasted with an alternative such as a newly proposed policy or a challenging politician. For simplicity I subsequently call participation the option that is not the status quo; this should be read as \contexts other than political participation or social movements.

In my analysis I simultaneously vary media strength, network properties, media bias, and, for two outlets, the strength of the L outlet. Though I keep my analysis to two biased outlets, it can easily be extended to multiple biased outlets with the addition of parameters dictating their relative strengths.

社交网络和大众传媒

大卫·西格尔

摘要：大众媒体，有很多种类，比如有国家宣传、非政府组织和国家党领导等，诸如此类的环球资源等信息是如何影响聚合行为的呢?之前在这个问题上的一些探索研究，特别是关于社交网络之间的复杂的相互作用和大众媒体对个人行为的影响研究显得不够深入。通过这种显式地交互建模,我展示了社会网络结构信息媒体的影响。之前对媒体影响的实证研究，没有考虑到这种偏见带来的风险，此外，社交网络交互可以放大这种媒体偏见，当个人可以选择进入哪一个媒体来匹配他们自己的偏好时，这将导致大幅波动的聚合行为变得更严重。反补贴媒体和社会精英的统一偏好可以减少这种偏见的影响，然而，媒体颁布这种反补贴对消除这种偏见是有着一定优势的。这些理论研究结果都相应地提出了许多可供测试的假设；我为讨论这些驱动和测试假设的模型提供了一些指导。

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