Am I the master of my own fate?
It’s 5:30 in the morning. I’m lumbering out of bed into a sweater and fumbling to get the back door open while my dogs impatiently whine and nip at my ankles to let them out. In a half-asleep stupor, I usher them into the backyard so they can do their business. The only light in the pitch-black yard is piercing blue light from my cell phone as I flick through the New York Times: The Morning daily newsletter that arrived in my inbox a few minutes earlier. I’m almost finished reading about the latest update in Ukraine, the most recent supply chain issues, and how to make a mean butter chicken to impress your friends; then the pups come racing up to the door, ready for breakfast. I put the phone in my pocket, sports bra, or the band of my leggings and tip toe past my sleeping partner to dump the smelliest venison food into the dogs’ slow-feeding bowls, giving me almost the exact time I need to finish the newsletter.
Still barely awake, I pull up my favorite yoga routine on YouTube and have to watch two unskippable ads about local elections for people I already plan on voting for. I do the routine, and the dogs return to bed to snuggle up with my partner. Finishing the routine, I watch another ad for an accent chair I’m considering purchasing, and my partner has woken up. Armed with noise-canceling AirPods, I turn on a Podcast and have to suffer through ads for investment platforms while I grind coffee to drink while getting ready. While coffee fills my Chemex, I scroll Instagram, seeing the funniest Washington Post TikTok turned Reel about the midterm elections. I watch a few more, learning about the latest mass shooting and new airline mask policies.
My coffee’s ready now, so I pour myself a mug and take it with me to finish getting ready. My partner starts to get in the shower and turns on his Bluetooth speaker to listen to American Public Media’s Marketplace. I turn off my Podcast just as the final ads for a new HR management software start playing. As Kai Ryssdal interviews a New York Times economics correspondent and a small business owner, I put on makeup and pick out clothes.
We listen to Marketplace as we make and eat breakfast. When I get in the car, I turn on Freakonomics or Planet Money. My partner doesn’t care for them, so it’s when I get to listen. I listen to Stephen Dubner ask brutal questions of whatever economist he invited to the show. — aggressively pointing out hypocrisy and bleeding his hand to the audience — hint: it’s a bit left-leaning.
By 7:30 am, I’ve consumed media from primary and secondary sources, been influenced by targeted advertising, and been persuaded by opinion leaders. As someone who goes out of their way to try to consume media from its primary source as often as I can, I can’t help what I see on social media and what I hear in ads, and opinion leaders inevitably influence my perspectives. These media interactions are the Two-Step Flow Theory in action.
The Two-Step flow theory suggests that people don’t get information directly from the media. Instead, the theory states that people get their news from trusted opinion leaders who sift through data from the media and provide audiences with the essential information they want to hear.
We consume mass media in ways early media theorists couldn’t have imagined. I can scroll through social media and see an influencer post something about abortion rights, and the following post could be a truncated article from NPR discussing the same thing. If I get the information from the same location, how does that affect where it fits into the Two Step Flow Theory? Does reducing the length of an article make NPR an opinion leader of its own news media? Some social scientists hypothesize that the Two-Step Flow Theory is not two steps but many steps as media go through many hands before reaching the audience.
If this is how we choose to view media consumption, we have to ask ourselves if the team creating the Washington Post TikToks adequately represent the content of the news story from which it comes. Does that make the account not primary media but an opinion leader? Does that mean an influencer who shares the TikTok to their account is also an opinion leader?
My social media accounts are ablaze with opinions during historic events, such as the January 6th insurrection, but they are often the same opinion. I see the identical posts reshared repeatedly, and it feels like my social feeds are echo chambers with very little genuine discourse. This repetition puts a responsibility on opinion leaders to present different perspectives, but they typically do not. Today, opinion leaders hold an equally important role in how audiences consume and perceive media as primary mass media sources do.
Regardless of whether a two-step or multi-step hypothesis is more accurate, with the advent of social media, it’s clear that, consciously or subconsciously, we absorb information from opinion leaders. The information we consume might be from an Instagram post with a convincing source or an unskippable ad in a YouTube video or Podcast. Opinion leaders play a significant role in our relationship with media and are responsible to their audiences to provide accurate information.