Weaving the consensus from the combination of the agendas: the Melding Agenda

Abstract

This essay was intended to reflect on the debate of the Melding Agenda, which was proposed by its creators as a hypothesis to a new dimension of the Setting Agenda, that brings a renewed approach that puts in the center a group of individuals capable to create connections one with another, to decide on one or various agendas and to establish their own.

This new perspective of the Melding Agenda or the combination of agendas, uncovers old, arbitrary and questioned positions such as the Hypodermic Needle Theory and the Theory of the Spiral of Silence, from which the individuals had reduced their capacities to think and decide, leaving behind the dominant and powerful effect that the media has in setting the agenda and thus, the public's priority over it.

In fact, the Melding Agenda has proposed a new theoretical, methodological and pragmatic paradigm, which aims to lead the media’s to a new era so that these can advance from vertical to more horizontal positions, to the extent in which they achieve to incorporate and prioritize as a part of their agenda the community’s own, understood as the group of individuals in a society.