Skip to main content



Media, Cascades, & Social Movements

Cascades of Coverage: Dynamics of Media Attention to Social Movement Organizations by Charles Seguin (July 29, 2015)

In class we described a simple, general cascade model that reflects how information can be cascaded through a network. Three ingredients in the model determine how decisions are made: states of the world, payoffs, and signals (high and low signals — informing whether accepting is a good or bad idea). Individuals influenced by network effects make decisions based off of these factors. In the examples we discussed, we see that “herding” or “information cascades” can occur when people make decisions sequentially. People watch the actions of earlier people, and from that they infer something about what these people know. Our discussion of the herding experiment demonstrated a few takeaways about cascades, namely that cascades are fragile, based on very little information, and can sometimes be wrong. In addition to information cascades, we also covered “rich-get-richer” models. These are based on the idea that a node in a network has a probability of increasing in popularity that is proportional its current popularity.

In Cascades of Coverage: Dynamics of Media Attention to Social Movement Organizations, Charles Seguin examines how cascades and “rich-get-richer” models apply to the media’s attention to social movements. The dominant model for explaining media and social movements emphasizes that the media has a “bias filter” that takes information from the world and translates it into news. However, Seguin argues that media attention acts less like a filter and more like a cascading, rich-get-richer model. Media follows a cascade model because upcoming news stories are based off of past news. So, “once an event or entity becomes defined as news, it will continue to be defined as news even if much of what made it of initial interest is gone” (Seguin 5). This forms a process of positive feedback, in which “media attention tends to increase the same variables that increase media attention.” These positive feedback processes in the media reflect the power-law distribution in the rich-get-richer models discussed in class. Seguin demonstrates his theory of positive feedback in the media by examing media attention and social movement organizations in two national U.S. data sets. He then provides a case study of positive feedback through a study of the Black Panther movement. From his analysis, Seguin enforces this idea of positive feedback the media. He further notes that media attention is “path dependent” and can depend on accidents in history. A result of this is that certain individuals, organizations, and events can dramatically affect how much media exposure a social movement organization receives.

 

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

November 2015
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

Archives