Introduction
Elisabeth Noelle von Neumann a German political adviser and a media researcher who developed the Spiral of Silence. Upon her death on 2010, her career as a media scholar and social scientist was highly praised not only in her native country, but internationally as well. Aside from being a media scholar, Neumann was also an adept entrepreneur. The Institut fur Demoskopie Allensbach, a German marketing and research firm belongs to her. Despite numerous awards gained, Neumann still studied the communication of the human society. The Spiral of Silence is a theory of Mass Communication. According to Neumann, the theory is all about public opinion. Originally, it focuses on how public opinions are created by people and how the fear of isolation affects the people’s mind in expressing their thoughts in public. Neumann used this theory to explain the 1930-1940’s political aggregation wherein German people supported a wrong political positions that eventually led Germany to its ruins. This theory is relatively useful in terms of Communication Studies in the field of Mass Media. This allows researchers to determine the percentage of how many people are bold enough to discuss their views in front of the society versus the percentage of those people who are constantly changing their views prior to the resulting dominant opinion. In short, this theory tackles the perceived ‘identity crisis’ of most people when they feel that their opinion is not the same as to what the majority is saying. At times, these people may change their opinion or worse, they may not express their thoughts at all for the fear of becoming publicly isolated primarily because they simply cannot relate to the topic. The purpose of this paper is to study and analyze Neumann’s Spiral of Silence and its possible relation to the emerging social networks wherein public opinion is widely distributed through the means of the Internet.
