The Climate of Opinion

My goal is to understand the power of public opinion and the ways in which it sustains itself. Some believe that in a democracy public opinion should go further. It should mean more to the people and to the ones who are elected by the individuals. While some feel the power is hardly in the hands of the people, in my research, I've come to find the public's voice and the potential it has to be more powerful than most of us realize. It can seek and destroy or bring life to the dead and everything you can imagine in-between.

Think for a moment about what public opinion is in today's world. It's composed almost entirely of human activity on the Internet. People are essentially pieces of the puzzle, wondering aimlessly through the halls of the Internet assembling here and there and when your personality fits into one aspect of it, you find a way to fit in. In this medium, your words are one of the most significant things you can contribute. They're your thoughts, but they don't have to be connected to anything. They're just thoughts.

In Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's book, The Spiral of Silence "Public Opinion - Our Social Skin," Her primary message is that public opinion simply depends on who talks and who doesn't. It's a very elementary concept but when you think about it we all have opinions, we all have desires, but how many of us actually share those thoughts and concerns? This gets very interesting, almost problematic when politics are involved.
Noelle-Neumann refers to her research here:
"Observations made in one context spread to another and encouraged people to either proclaim their views or to swallow them and keep quite until, in a spiraling process, the one view dominated the public scene and the other disappeared from public awareness and it's adherents became mute."

Opinions and public perception have the ability to drastically swing one way or another due to the overall view, which in return forces those who disagree into hiding. To me, this clearly indicates how our news and political coverage of even truly historical events in time are portrayed to us.

Another book I've read parts of that I will pursue for my research is W. Phillip Davison's "The Third Person Effect in Communication" While Noelle-Neumann does site Davison's work there are aspects of these two writings that conflict. Davison's book focus' more on the individual aspect of why we are inspired to have this public discourse no matter what the circumstances. *Note..More to come on Davison as I look into more of his published works.

Moving forward I plan to combine these two aspects regarding the overwhelming climate of public opinion and see how they impact published journalistic reports (specifically political) in our current world. I feel this is becoming a much more influential aspect of humanity as we continue to evolve and understanding it's power can be a useful tool to those who care to use it. The idea is greater than one person, which is something that can always be an extremely powerful, beautiful, or even dangerous thing.