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Much of human history occurred with little attention to the idea of opinion. Under systems of government that were monarchical or feudal, the thoughts and feelings of the average man mattered almost not at all. It wasn’t until the advent of the very gradual process of the assertion of individual human rights in the political sphere, the Enlightenment, that opinions were brought to the fore. As this happened, there were not clear ideas about how opinions were formed, how they were “aggregated” into larger “public opinion,” or whether the process was in any way rational.

One of the key figures in media effects theory, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, has given a cogent account of how opinion came to matter along two tracks. First, there is the idea of public opinion as a means through which gradually expanding classes of people contribute to the political discourse in rational ways. This form of public opinion (raisonnement in the words of the French Enlightenment thinkers) is how we like to think of public opinion (its “sunny side” as Noelle-Neumann puts it) contributing ever more progressively to the development of a politics that can benefit the largest number. People express viewpoints in public settings, and deliberative discourse based on these ideas leads to solutions for the body politic. It’s what we colloquially think of as the “marketplace of ideas.”

On the other side, though, she finds the idea of opinion as social control, looking at the tendencies of people to base their actions not only on their own beliefs and attitudes, but also on what others think about them. Because, as social animals, we need and require approval from the group for what we do, we regulate and censor our own beliefs and activities to assure that they will meet with that approval (Noelle-Neumann, 1993). Thus, we have not only our own rationally-formed individual opinions, but our expression of opinion as conditioned by what the group thinks about us. Because the latter process is based on this need for group approval, it is seen as less rational than raisonnement and ultimately more affective. It can even lead to irrationally-held opinions.

Both tracks of thinking have had great impact on media effects work. Rational ideas about opinion are seen in work that seeks to understand how individuals form opinions; we notice it quite clearly in the frequent use of psychological theories that explain how people extract facts and images from media and build those logically into attitudes and opinions. On this track, media in effect become a prime source of, if not the prime source of, personal opinion. The huge body of literature that has developed on attitude change is of this stripe. Media are seen as variables that can play a direct role in the formation of rationally held attitudes, and they have the capacity to change attitudes that might be strongly held by individuals.

Conversely, the idea of opinion as social control also influenced several major theories of media effect, including Noelle-Neumann’s own “spiral of silence” theory, as well as Gerbner’s “cultivation” theory (more on these later as well). On this darker view of opinion, media messages come to be seen as possibly sinister forces that can “manufacture” opinion in directions sought by elites. Because people have an instinctual need to know what others think about their own opinions, and because media provide the main vehicle for disseminating information about the popularity of opinions, media play an outsize role in drawing support for what eventually become the majoritarian positions. Public susceptibility to media messages, driven by an a-rational need to conform, becomes another important part of the media effects picture, especially in relation to phenomena such as propaganda.