Two communication theories that have been utilized throughout the duration of my internship are Social Penetration Theory and Agenda-Setting Theory. There are many more that I could tie into my experiences while working at the radio station; however, I have chosen to focus on these two specific theories.

Social Penetration Theory states that all relationships that individuals develop start out as a surface level interaction and move towards having more deep connections. This theory is best described as the layers of an onion. The outer layer represents that surface level relationship whereas the center layer is the deepest level of a relationship. At my internship, all of my relationships started out at that outer layer of the metaphorical onion. As time went on, my relationships with my coworkers developed more. Even if they didn’t become super deep connections, they still were gradually becoming less surface level. I actually discovered that one of my coworkers actually knew me when I was a baby, so our relationship was a little deeper than my other coworkers that I met when I began the internship. The way these relationships developed over time is described by the use of Social Penetration Theory.

The second theory I used was Agenda-Setting Theory, which is defined as when an influencer, such as a media outlet or in my case, a radio station, frames messages and sends them out to the public. These influencers act as “gatekeepers” in the sense that they get to decide which information is sent out to the public. One of the tasks I completed during my internship was finding news stories to be talked about on air. Through this task, I acted as the “gatekeeper” since I was in charge of deciding which stories were most valuable to be spoken about on air. While majority of the days I was following up on different stories, on June 18th, a major story occured within the music industry that I decided was needed to be spoken about during the duration of the show. Young rapper, Xxxtentacion, was murdered that afternoon. The information was coming in while I was at the station so we were updating the story real-time. Since this was a huge story, agenda-setting theory expresses why I decided to only speak about that situation.