Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

L'héritage de Gabriel Tarde

1993; National Center for Scientific Research; Volume: n° 11-12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4267/2042/15498

1963-1006

Elihu Katz, Éric Maigret, Daniel Dayán,

French Language Learning Methods

There is no point in storing a treasury of contradictory references in our memory banks about the implications of the active-passive debate for media users and citizens. On the active side, Tarde can be nominated as the forefather of the limited effects approach. Yet he anticipates the revision that the two step model of communication has undergone, in its current emphasis on the flow of influence, not the flow of information; on the group as a unit of analysis, not the individual; on the mutuality of conversations, not the relay from leaders to followers. Tarde's model and its main constituents - (media-conversation-opinion-action) - can be translated into testable hypotheses, all relating to a major assertion namely that the press does not exert a direct influence. This influence consists of providing an agenda for the conversations in which opinion is forged. In order to assess the validity of this hypothesis, one should involve sociolinguistics, a discipline mainly concerned with the study of the dynamics of conversation and founded by Tarde among others.