Specification a Model for Study of Socio-Political Framing Volume 1 - Issue 3

Cruz García Lirios*

• Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Mexico

Received: December 21, 2019   Published: January 21, 2020

Corresponding author: Cruz García Lirios, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Mexico

Abstract PDF

Informative discussion about the bias of traditional media to anticipate scenarios of socio - political participation was the objective of this work. A documentary study was carried out with an intentional selection of sources indexed to international repositories, considering the period from 2010 to 2019, as well as the search for keywords. A model for the study of the phenomenon was specified, but the design of the research limited the debate and the modeling of the variables, suggesting the extension of the work in media scenarios.

Keywords: Media; Framing; Agenda; Participation; Identity

An agenda is the expression of a reflective, deliberative, participatory, entrepreneurial and emancipatory society of its own axes and central themes of discussion, agreement and responsibility [1]. It is a scenario in which the parties converge based on their exposed or potential interests.

However, literature has addressed it as part of a political, economic, social, cultural or technological process without considering the capacity of the actors to compensate their disabilities, satisfy their needs and take advantage of their opportunities.

Literature, gross mode, warns that the media process begins and ends with the media, assuming that those who control them play in another scenario of power and influence [2].The state of the issue is aware that an agenda is a collection of symbols and data, but they do not know why the supply and demand of these balances or not the capacities of organizations and institutions in electoral or contingent contexts such as risk events.

This is how the agenda is considered the most important process of the media; television, radio, press and cinema, but very little is known about a central dimension that literature identifies as a media bias or effect agenda setting and framing or framing. Even literature has explored the power of the media in its audiences through the intensity bias or priming and the recon figurative bias or melding effect but has not discussed why a phenomenon such as risk events; Hurricanes, frosts, droughts, fires, earthquakes, floods or storms have an apparently natural origin and impact local or federal elections months later. Well, a review of the theory that brings together other conceptual matrices will be relevant to explain the exposed relationships.

The complexity of a mediatic and tourist locality like Xilitla, center and Mexico can be explained from the Psychosocial Theories of the Conflict and Change. The water v ulnerability, precarious, migratoryintensity and identity resilient be explained from theory Social Belonging Theory Social Categorization, Theory and Social Representation Theory Social Identity.

Local Development is considered as a framework of hydric, migratory and labor situations oriented to the resilience of a community, the Theory of Social Membership (TPS) would suggest that the groups generate a dynamic such that each of its members seeks to adhere to the shared symbols. It is a process of loyalty not only to the groups to which the individual belongs, but to the groups to which he wishes to belong. In the process of adherence to a group, people adjust their decisions and actions to the norm of a group [3]. The transgression of group principles encourages sanctions that reorient the adherence of the individual to the group.

However, within each group, asymmetric relations of power are generated that make the conflicts that will define adherence to norm inescapable. That is, belonging to a group symbolizes a membership that is renewed each time the conflict defines the propensity or aversion to rules which, by the way, are redefined through asymmetric relationships. The conflict activates the change of a group to another and with it, the conformity or innovation of the norms [4]. As conflicts intensify, regulations discourage asymmetries among members. In the passing of time and in the course of the rules, individuals renew their votes to set up new groups.

Social psychologists have developed the Theory of Social Categorization (SST) to explain homogeneity within a group and heterogeneity about other groups. It is a perceptive bias that explains the conflict of endogenous interests or social change [5]. In the case of regulations, people adjust their principles, decisions and actions to a group prototype. The assignment of a role by the group makes the individual more inclined to adhere, even defend, the statutes of the reference group.

It is about the formation of an individual self-concept in reference to the prototypical norm of the group. In this sense, the TCS explains two processes: depersonalization and ethnocentrism [6]. That is, in their desire to join a group, everyone reduces their expectations to the norm of a group and upholds the normative principles of the group to which they belong or want to belong.

Although social categorization explains cohesion, cooperation and influence, it also explains conflicts of interest and innovation. The group dynamic is such that it requires constant changes for its preservation [7]. Compliance guarantees the conservation of values, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes and even knowledge, but conflict drives the development of new asymmetric relationships and with it, competition and innovation. Therefore, a minority can dissuade another minority and persuade a majority.

In short, the TCS maintains that each person continually processes fragmented information about the group, the space and the resources it has.

However, such information processing is biased because the norms of a group are the result of experiences and inexperience’s [8]. It is the perception of the individual that oversees joining the pieces and giving it an eminently symbolic meaning of comparison between the current situation of a group in reference to its prospective situation and that of other groups.

The TPS and the TCS are part of a symbolic communicative process known as social representation. Social psychologists suggest that this process includes two dimensions: objectification and anchoring [9].

The Theory of Social Representation (TRS), unlike the TPS and the TCS delimits the group processes to their communicative aspects. The asymmetric differences that give rise to the structuring conflict are considered by the TRS as informative differences that enhance the beliefs and knowledge of each individual. In this sense, the conflict would be a forerunner of the change that would consist of replacing beliefs with knowledge (Izquierdo, 2012).

As conflicts activate the internal or external communication of a group, they reduce the diversity of personal symbols to a few meanings and group senses [10]. It is a process of exhaustion of personal beliefs and their transformation into group knowledge. Now, the structuring conflict seems to take place in a peripheral area of social representations about a central nucleus in which symbols are constituted in traditions, uses and customs.

Precisely, the naturalization of the symbols takes place in the figurative nucleus that legitimizes the stigmata towards a minority group at the same moment that it disappears as a group referent [11]. In such a process, objectification and anchoring explain the landing of abstract concepts and their conversion into concrete entities.

In summary, the TRS duly explains the processing of information that affects the choice of a group, its communication styles and influence.

Although the TPS, the TCS and the TRS seem to glimpse the choice of a group, social psychologists have developed the Theory of Social Identity (TIS) to explain the relationship between situations, decisions and actions of individuals when choosing the group, they want to belong to.

Social identity, as well as belonging, categorization and representation, seems to have two dimensions for its analysis: self-categorical and hetero-categorial [12]. The first refers to the identification made by the dominant group, majority or minority, regarding their capacities and resources, attributing them to extra properties that make them different from the other group members.

In contrast, the dominated elements seem to attribute their situation to their abilities. The asymmetric relationships in a group seem to be explained by the attributions that their members make of themselves about the other members. The existing differences between both groups, low and high status, seem to be legitimized and justified from the social identity [13]. The permanence of such internalized attributions is explained by the internalization that each group makes of the characteristics that they attribute to them. A group convinces itself of its abilities once it has undermined the version of the other groups that perceive it.

In terms of communication, of a stimulus that is presented as an essential part of different groups, high or low status, there are two biases: an intra-categorial homogeneity and an inter-categorial differentiation. On the one hand, the individuals of a group consider that these communicative stimuli are inexorable to their characteristics, causing them to perceive themselves as different from other groups of higher or lower status.

However, when the communicative stimuli are perceived as inherent to a group, the consequence is a perception of illegitimacy, then a structuring conflict is generated that will result in a change of group identity.

In short, the theories explain the conflict that structures the individual as a social actor by inserting it into the norms of a group. This process is circumscribed to minority or majority status [14]. The symbols and meanings among the members of a group seem to be concentrated in a nucleus of representation in which the objectification, anchoring and naturalization of the information shapes the group’s status and its corresponding norms. The assignment of a role by the group homogenizes the identity, but the innovation diversifies the regulations of the groups.

In the case of Xilitla, the theories put forward would suggest that water vulnerability, job insecurity, migratory intensity and resilient identity are the result of belonging, categorization, representation and social identity. In other words, water scarcity and commercial activities explain the migration and the issuance of remittances, but the psychosocial processes would suggest that Xilitla’s water availability and commercial activities are the result of conflicts that were structured in minorities and majorities the communities and localities of the region. Apparently, the normative symbols of the entity that were built inside the microregion Huasteca contributed decisively in the Local Development of Xilitla. The nucleus of symbolic representation delineated the axes of search of opportunities in which the migration was a primordial instrument. Once the water resources were exhausted, agriculture ceased to be the local economic support. Government authorities encouraged tourism and trade that compromised, even more, the sustainability of the region.

In the first instance, migration was an escape valve and later, it was transformed into a resilience instrument. Around the migratory flows, collaborative networks and remittance nodes were structured. Once sent to the region, the local economy was reactivated, but at the expense of restructuring the majorities that continued practicing agriculture and at the cost of ennobling the minorities that diversified the region’s trade. This process proved insufficient to even preserve the resources committed due to its scarcity.

The region of Xilitla is in a situation such that its relationship with nature does not seem to worry as long as it does not compromise its uses and customs. In this sense, the study of the preservation of the environment would indicate the degree of sustainability, vulnerability and resilience of the region. Therefore, it is necessary to interpret the speeches that the migrant community of the Huasteca region manifests in the face of water shortages, job insecurity and the search for employment outside the region.

The contribution of the present work to the state of the question lies in the discussion about the sociopolitical setting in the establishment of a local agenda, assuming differences between political and social actors, public and private sectors involved in the media phenomenon, but the design of the research limited the debate by orienting the specification towards a zero-sum scenario. García et al. [15] suggest the study of the framing based on the distinctive category of citizenship since it is the media that adjust to its new contemporary status without considering its capacity for agency, but in the present work has been discussed that the media bias not only promotes agendas or builds discussion topics but also forms the opinion of citizens regardless of their discursive update. Veliz et al. [16] They are committed to a civic and democratic education centered on ethics, knowing that these sociopolitical structures materialize in dispositions against or in favor of a media reality.

In the present work, it is insisted that reality, whatever it may be, acquires a media status when it is symbolized, processed, configured, recreated and reused as a self -expressive instrument of expressivity. The speech is only an instrument of transformation of data or symbols that humans carry out to reduce or amplify a message or propaganda.

García et al. [17] point out that the categories of citizenship, democracy and governance have in common the social services that are an institutional frame of the facts as far as needs are concerned, since, if health is the fundamental axis of the State , then the media would not have to minimize or expand data on births or deaths because they would be subject to constant scrutiny by a population highly interested in debating the asymmetries between state and institutional information with respect to the media.

Research lines related to the information bias will make it possible to observe the similarities with other institutional, political or civil agendas, but, above all, the construction of a public agenda will allow progress towards deliberative democracy [18,19].

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