The Spiral of Silence

According to Britannica, the Spiral of Silence is “the theory that people’s willingness to express their opinions on controversial public issues is affected by their largely unconscious perception of those opinions as being either popular or unpopular.” The theory essentially exists to describe a person’s hesitation to express their opinion if they deem it as unpopular to the group they are expressing it too in order “to avoid the danger of isolation”. It was created by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a german survey and communication researcher in the 1960s and 70s after she was found some interesting results while gathering polling statistics for the 1965 German federal election, the two main parties conflicting for power were the Christian Democratic Union - Christian Social Union (CDU-CSU) vs and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), for a long time the two parties were locked in a roughly even 45% split both ways, but when Queen Elizabeth II made a trip to Germany to support the CDU-CSU, that party took a 10% lead, which they held onto until they won the election. Noelle-Neumann believes that this drastic change in the population was because the CDU-CSU incorrectly claimed to be the more popular party because of the Queen’s support, which increased reluctance among people to support the SDP because everyone wants to vote for the party that is going to win. From these interesting election results, she got her idea for the Spiral of Silence.

However, this election is not a simple example of the Spiral of Silence. Some easier to understand examples would be when you change what shirt you wear because you think people will think that shirt is weird or unflattering, or when you see a movie that you did not like, but you don’t say anything because the friends you saw it with all loved it. Any situation where you feel that you hold a minority opinion and then decide not to express that opinion because it is a minority opinion is a situation where you are falling victim to the Spiral of Silence. However, the Spiral of Silence asserts that the inverse is also true. People who view their beliefs as popular are more likely to voice them, and loudly too.

It is important to keep in mind that the Spiral of Silence applies to many different kinds of situations in groups. In any group large or small where a person feels their opinion could be perceived and judged, the Spiral of Silence exists. This is why it can affect an event as casual as going to a movie with your friends or something as important as an election. There just needs to exist a majority opinion that is perceived as a social norm. Some sociologists call this the “climate of opinion” (Glynn et al., 1995). Current sociologists are even researching how the Spiral of Silence affects online interactions. One such researcher is Tio Gabunia who is finding that comment sections are a clear way that people can find what the majority opinion is on each and every post. He finds that people are less likely to comment on a post where they hold an opinion that is uncommon among the comment section of the post and more likely to comment when their opinion is in agreement with the other comments. By only interacting with posts that agree with their opinions, the algorithms on these social media platforms only recommend posts that agree with the user in order to boost post interaction. This is what traps people online in an echo chamber of opinions that reinforce only their own beliefs. Due to this, the Spiral of Silence has become an important idea to be aware of now more than ever.

Below are my sources:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/spiral-of-silence

https://nlwbkq.medium.com/spiral-of-silence-mean-girls-a724ae6b964d

https://study.com/academy/lesson/spiral-silence-theory-overview-examples-facts.html

https://helpfulprofessor.com/spiral-of-silence-theory/

Online Privacy, Or Rather, the Lack Thereof

Out of the four TED Talks, the last two were the ones that really grabbed my attention. In the third video, I was not really in agreement at first with the stance the speaker, Christopher Soghoian, was taking on cell phone encryption because I thought national security against terrorism was more important than leaving a backdoor in your phone. That was until he told the story about how hackers were able to wiretap the Greek prime minister and members of the Greek cabinet in order to listen to all of their phone calls without being caught by hacking into Greece’s largest phone provider, Vodafone Greece. After hearing about that, I was convinced that phone companies should build in encryptions and firewall security measures against wiretapping in our cell phones.

However, I felt much more stirred by the fourth video by Darieth Chisolm. This is easily the privacy issue I am the most concerned about that was brought up out of these four TED Talks. Digital domestic violence or “revenge porn” as Chisolm called it is a serious issue that has become much too normalized in modern society because lawmakers have not taken a stance against it, which Chisolm brought up in her presentation. Only one federal bill has been proposed to create actual sentences for this very serious crime, which is called The Enough Act by Vice President Kamala Harris. However, there needs to be more. Unfortunately, the people’s representatives in the federal government are entirely too old to be making the decisions that they are making. It is unacceptable that there are several senators older than the television. We only just had the first Gen Z congress member, Maxwell Frost of Florida, be elected this January. With the incredibly fast moving pace of developing technology in the modern world. The government needs representatives who are equipped to quickly and aptly respond to these changes, and our current representatives are NOT those people.

Comics Through the Diffusion Theory

Comics have been a prevalent form of media since the 40s, so how does the Diffusion of Innovation Theory by E.M. Rogers explain their rise to popularity? In order to understand the Diffusion Theory clearly and effectively, please view this article by Boston University or the graph below. In summary, the Diffusion Theory explains how an idea or invention becomes accepted by a population.

When an idea or invention is first released, only a small number of people know about it. These people are called innovators or pioneers. These people include the creators of the innovation as well as people brought in to test it. For comics, its innovators would be the publishers and readers of “The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats,” which is considered to be the first proper comic book from 1897. They published this children’s book in this fashion because it was cheap to mass produce and distribute. The next group in the Diffusion Theory are the early adopters, who are the people who recognize innovation as a way to better their own ideas and business. The most notable people of this group for comics would be Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who created Superman. They would forever associate comic books with superheroes and raise comics as medium to a new level, which would bring a whole new audience; these people would be called the early majority. 

In the Diffusion Theory, the early majority are the 34% of the population who begin using the medium after it has been developed. This is the group that makes something popular. In between the early and late majority is the tipping point, which is the point at the height of the chart when the population has been cleanly divided into two groups: those that use the invention and those that do not. In the world of comics, these two groups are incredibly important because this concept of early versus late majority is what creates the idea that older comics are worth more. For example, if you own the first issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” that becomes a statement that says, “I was there back when it began. I was a fan even back then.” In the comics community, there is an unspoken yet agreed upon rule that being a part of the early majority is a badge of honor. 

However, there are still many people who do not read comics. The Diffusion Theory calls those people “laggards.” Laggards are the resistors who choose not to use an invention because of a hesitance of change. Comics still have a lot of laggards out of the population, but this is because of the unique reason that comics have a long and confusing history that overwhelms most people when they want to start reading. Comic companies are constantly trying to find a way to simplify the process of beginning to read comics in order to tap into this last untapped group of the population and convert them into new fans.

Why Are Antiwar Voices Not Heard?

While reading through the news story database ANTIWAR.com, I learned some very interesting things about the US government’s involvement in many of our recent wars. Both sites were filled with stories that I had no clue were even going on in our world today. For example, I found this article by The Libertarian Institute on ANTIWAR.com, NATO Tests AI Submarine Drones During the War Games, that shows one example of how emerging Artificial Intelligence technology is revolutionizing yet another facet of modern life. However, this is one part of the world that I do not think AI needs to be involved in. Have “War Games” and “The Terminator” series taught us nothing?

In all serious, this is a piece of technology that is incredibly dangerous and scary enough that the head of NATO’s cell for protecting undersea infrastructure, Lieutenant General Hans-Werner Wiermann, stated to Bloomberg that the test; “sends a deterrence signal to the enemy, be it Russia or somebody else.” Clearly, this new AI submarine is meant to send a warning message to Moscow.

It is pretty clear just from ANTIWAR.com's website that it is not a mainstream news website. However, its intensive research and ability to pull from many different sources makes it a great site to get information on a wide variety of many different stories. However, just from their name it is clear that they have a specific and clear position that they take. Yet many news sources are able to have a clear bias and still be successful as a new source. Then why does ANTIWAR.com have such a hard time breaking into the mainstream as a well known news source? Why don't any anti war voices have a place in the mainstream? It seems that every mainstream news source has certain positions they always have to take, whether that source is from the right or the left.

Learning About the Mail System

During the EOTO presentations, I learned a lot about the creation of the mail system from Quinn Bailey’s presentation. The mail system is so old and so prevalent throughout the world and human history that I have never even bothered to consider researching the history of the mail system. According to one of Quinn’s sources, Britannica, its earliest references in historical documents actually date back to ancient Egypt around 2000 BC as well as in China about a thousand years later under the Zhou Dynasty, which was the longest lasting dynasty in Chinese history and lasted nearly eight hundred years. That means the mail system is only roughly 500 years younger than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

After talking briefly about the inception of the mail system, Quinn focused the scope of her presentation on specifically the creation of the United States’ mail system, which has much more well documented history since it is much more recent. Massachusetts was the first colony to have a mail system in 1633, but it was not until nearly a century and a half later that the country had its first postmaster general in 1775, who was Benjamin Franklin.

From there, Quinn gave an overview of the history of the US postal service. A couple of the events that stuck out to me as particularly interesting were when the Constitution declared that Congress has the power to set up post offices and roads for mail delivery in 1788, when the first mail stamps were made in 1847, when charging rates were changed from distance to weight in 1863, and when zip codes were created in 1963. I find it incredibly interesting to see how all of these small details that define our modern day mail system were added one by one over the years to create the system we are so familiar with now.