The article, ‘A New Era of Minimal Effects ? A Response to Bennett and Iyengar’, acts as a response of the authors, Holbert, Garrett & Gleason, to the notion of Socio technical change as formulated by Bennett and Iyengar’. In their work, ‘A New Era of Minimal Effects ? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication’, the authors Bennett and Iyengar focused on the number of emerging social and technological issues and emphasized those issues as channel proliferation and a broader socio technical change. As a response to this view, the authors Holbert, Garrett & Gleason made use of some core assumptions and conceptualizations to re shape the conclusion made by Bennett and Iyengar in their paper. The tile of this paper rightly echoes the questions that have been raised by Bennett and Iyengar addressing the minimal effects.
The authors as a response to Bennett and Iyengar, focused on the persuasive effects and equated the persuasive effect with change in attitude of people, whereas according to the classic social influence scholarship, persuasion is not only associated with attitude change but is equally associated with attitude formation and reinforcement of attitude.
The authors further argues with the view of Bennett and Iyengar that states that political and media based decisions are generally made by dedicated consumers as in recent times, there is a greater media choice for the people. In this context, the authors introduces the idea of post-broadcast democracy since people now have a broader media choice which provides them the opportunity to select and watch the content they wish to. The authors conclude the paper by establishing the fact that in recent times, the increasing use of technology has considerably allowed the consumers to become agenda setter. In this paper, the author put forward some core issues that can concern the future of political-communication based media effects.
