I Am the Agenda: Personal Salience, Agenda Selfying and Individual Name Building in Hybrid Media Settings

This theoretical paper introduces the notion of personal salience, expanding the traditional paradigm of agenda setting theory to encompass digital, online activities for the establishment of personal agendas. Self-agendas have been examined from many diverging points of view and competing perspectives. In this paper, we aim to place them within the precise categorization of the agenda setting paradigm. In its fifty-year history, scholars have examined the specific mechanisms and processes that render “issues” and “objects” salient. The current paper aims to classify personal agendas and personal salience as distinct typologies of mediated significance

Museum promotion and cultural salience: the agenda of the Athenian Acropolis museum

This case study examines a process of agenda building in the context of cultural organizations. We chose the Acropolis Museum, as a new, emerging cultural organization in the European periphery which engages in public actions, in the form of symbolic initiatives, in order to set a specific cultural agenda for Greek and international media. We scrutinize seven symbolic initiatives publicized by the museum, as attributes that influence media content. We conclude that development of cultural/educational services, advertising and marketing, visitor/customer relations, partnerships, symbolic actions, special events, and supporting services constitute significant cultural attributes, which strategically become a part of the media agenda, thereby contributing toward the building of a museum agenda

“Chemtrails” in the Sky: Toward a Group-mediated Delusion Theory

This case study proposes the concept of group-mediated delusion as a social media related phenomenon. A group-mediated delusion is defined as a jointly held unverifiable view or belief, which a group enforces and sustains through public discussions and persuasion in social media community environments. This study focuses on the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory using descriptive data gathered from Facebook and the Google Trends service. The study concludes that the “chemtrails” notion was enhanced by virtual groups/communities on social media. Google Trends evidence shows an increasing global interest from 2004 until 2015, while most of the Facebook groups were established from 2010 until 2015. The study discusses several implications related to group-mediated delusions

Testing the uses and gratifications approach to museum visiting: adopting a mediated perspective in the cultural domain

This paper examines the motivations of museum visitors and some of the primary needs they seek to satisfy in their contact with museums. The authors used a survey conducted in three regional museums of the island of Lesvos in Greece to establish a hierarchy of visitor gratifications. The survey included questions about demographic information and asked visitors to rank their motives when visiting the museums. It was filled in by 416 visitors and was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that cultural and educational gratifications were significant motivations for visitation and were ranked higher than entertainment or escape motivations. Ηaving a “cultural experience” was the primary reason visitors stated for visiting the museums. The study used a regression model to understand how the concept of cultural experience relates to demographic, educational, and motivational elements

The Salience of Fakeness: Experimental Evidence on Readers’ Distinction between Mainstream Media Content and Altered News Stories

This experiment was designed to explore people’s critical, differentiating capacity between actual news and content that looks like news. Four groups of post-millennials read four versions of a news story. While the first condition included a real news story derived from a mainstream medium, the other three conditions tested three attributes of fakeness, namely an exaggerated, satirical, and popularised frame of disinformation. Although readers differentiated between satire and the actual news story, no significant differences were observed between exaggerated and simplified versions of news and the actual news story. Additional intervening variables were scrutinized, showing a connection between the salience of a story and its perceptions of fakeness

The salience of 'Fakeness': Experimental Evidence on Readers' Distinction between Mainstream Media Content and Altered News Stories

This experiment was designed to explore people’s critical, differentiating capacity between actual news and content that looks like news. Four groups of post-millennials read four versions of a news story. While the first condition included a real news story derived from a mainstream medium, the other three conditions tested three attributes of fakeness, namely an exaggerated, satirical, and popularised frame of disinformation. Although readers differentiated between satire and the actual news story, no significant differences were observed between exaggerated and simplified versions of news and the actual news story. Additional intervening variables were scrutinized, showing a connection between the salience of a story and its perceptions of fakeness

Cultural agenda setting: salient attributes in the cultural domain

In this paper, we propose that agenda-setting theory also applies in the cultural domain of human activities. We argue that because cultural goods have high levels of relevance and uncertainty, their potential consumers will experience a high Need for Orientation (NFO), which will make them seek information in the news media, just like they do when faced with an NFO in the political domain. Moreover, we expect that agenda-setting theory would apply in the cultural domain in a more fragmented manner and that within the cultural domain it would apply differently in various cultural sub-domains. To build our argument, we draw from media, cultural studies and marketing literatures