Shannon McEnerney | March 23, 2010
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| UNC’s Don Shaw spoke on agenda setting and social communities Monday. |
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Monday, Shaw spoke to a crowd at the Maple Room in the Indiana Memorial Union about community, agenda setting and social groups. “Connecting Community: How Agenda Setting Reflects Social Melding” was part of the School of Journalism’s Research Colloquia and was co-sponsored by the IU Colloquium on Political Communication Research.
Roy W. Howard Professor David Weaver said he considers Shaw to be a “kind of genius.”
“There aren’t other people who think like he does,” Weaver said. “He’s very creative.”
Shaw served as both Weaver’s and School of Journalism Dean Brad Hamm’s dissertation professor when they attended UNC-Chapel Hill.
Weaver’s research focus is agenda setting and he teaches a class on the topic. As Weaver’s students work on research projects of their own, Weaver said Shaw’s presentation helps to provide ideas and perspective as they continue to research.
Shaw said he can’t recall a conversation that doesn’t involve an agenda. When deciding where to go for lunch, there is an agenda, he said, much like when deciding what movie to go to. There is motivation behind the conversations, he said, which leads to an agenda.
“I wonder if agendas are better thought of as communities,” Shaw said, proceeding to relate an example of a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it fall.
“If you have a media agenda and no one to hear it, is there an agenda community?” Shaw asked.
“The answer is no, there is not. You cannot have agenda setting without audience participation.”
People, Shaw said, belong to all sorts of communities that they participate in and absorb.
“Agenda setting is nothing more than a thermometer on the wall of social function,” Shaw said.
People belong to communities they don’t realize exist. Students join a professor’s agenda with each class they take in order to pass the class. Personally, Shaw said that he is a Tar Heel, a North Carolinian – all communities that he does not remember “signing up” for but is a part of.
There is also what Shaw describes as vertical media and horizontal media. Vertical media include media such as newspaper and broadcast, whereas horizontal media includes new media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter.
“I don’t believe social change is possible without some sort of vertical media,” Shaw said. Vertical media create vertical agendas, which create a community, and it is necessary to have a community at some level in order for social change to occur, he explained.
Vertical media connects us all, Shaw said.
“You can act all day but unless you can get to vertical agenda you won’t get social change,” Shaw said. “A part of me is trying to untangle media effect and audience effect. Media has no effect without an audience.”
Aquila said she found Shaw’s discussion of the role of the community interesting, especially in how he is trying to define communities in a more modern way.
“And also in the distinct ways of identifying various communities and what their role is in news assessment,” Aquila said.
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| Photo by James Brosher |
| Shaw visited last spring to hear Roy W. Howard Professor David Weaver’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture. From left are Weaver, Edward Caudill of the University of Tennessee and Shaw. |
“It’s great to hear people who have been working in the field for a long time and watch how their work has evolved over time,” she said.
But Shaw is more than a researcher. He’s also a teacher.
“In addition to being someone who has really creative ideas no one else has, he can make you smile,” Weaver said. “He has a wonderful sense of humor and he has a wonderful rapport with his students.”
Weaver said Shaw is close to his graduate and undergraduate students, helping them in their research and endeavors, as he “cares a lot for his students and is willing to do anything for them.”
“He’s an important mentor not just for research,” Weaver said. “He is not just a researcher but a teacher, too.”
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