Setting the agenda: Different strategies of a Mass Media in a model of cultural dissemination

Abstract

Day by day, people exchange opinions about a given new with relatives, friends, and coworkers. In most cases, they get informed about a given issue by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through a Mass Media (MM). However, the importance of a given new can be stimulated by the Media by assigning newspaper's pages or time in TV programs. In this sense, we say that the Media has the power to "set the agenda", i.e., it decides which new is important and which is not. On the other hand, the Media can know people's concerns through, for instance, websites or blogs where they express their opinions, and then it can use this information in order to be more appealing to an increasing number of people. In this work, we study different scenarios in an agentbased model of cultural dissemination, in which a given Mass Media has a specific purpose: To set a particular topic of discussion and impose its point of view to as many social agents as it can. We model this by making the Media has a fixed feature, representing its point of view in the topic of discussion, while it tries to attract new consumers, by taking advantage of feedback mechanisms, represented by adaptive features. We explore different strategies that the Media can adopt in order to increase the affinity with potential consumers and then the probability to be successful in imposing this particular topic.

Quantifying time-dependent Media Agenda and public opinion by topic modeling

“…Finally, we consider that this work could be used as an starting point in developing data-driven mathematical models about the interaction between mass media and society, given the traditional approaches coming from statistical physics [41,42,43,44,45], where much of the models lack in being contrasted with real data. Future works may include a more systematic study and its extension to international media, a deeper study combining topic detection and sentiment analysis, and a more quantitative analysis about causality.…”

A data-driven model for Mass Media influence in electoral context

“…When the discussion is about a specific topic, this process can be modelled using one-dimensional approach based on classical models, as for instance the Deffuants model with continuous opinions [34], various extensions of the voter model [35,36], and the Sznadjs model [37,38]. On the other hand, when the intention is to model the whole agenda of a media outlet, typically a multidimensional approach is used based on Axelrod's model [9,10,39,40,41,42,43]. If it is intended to model opinion changes related to political positions, a bi-dimensional representation based in Nolan Charts political spectrum diagram [21,22] or Political Compass [19] could be used.…”

“…On another stream of research, computational models have been implemented in order to describe collective behaviour arising from interactions between Mass Media and the citizens [9,10,11], providing theoretical tools to understand micro to macro effects in this situations. Other approaches are based on the analysis of large amount of data coming from surveys, as in [12,13], from big data [14] or from online traffic [15], where the authors have shown that the relative change in the number of page views of a general Wikipedia page on the election day can offer a reasonable estimation of the relative change in turnout for that election at the country level.…”

Culture and cooperation in a spatial public goods game

“…The Axelrod model has subsequently been extended in a variety of ways, including the introduction of "mass media" or other external cultural influence [25][26][27][28][29], complex networks [30,31], coevolving networks [32,33], and agent migration [34,35]. Two important extensions to the model are nondyadic interactions [36][37][38] and noise [32,36,39,40].…”