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

SEBASTIAN PINTO; BALENZUELA, PABLO; C. O. DORSO

PHYSICA A - STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL PHYSICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016 vol. 458 p. 378 - 390

0378-4371

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 byreading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through aMass Media (MM). However, the importance of a given new can be stimulated bythe 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 whichnew is important and which is not. On the other hand, the Media can knowpeople´s concerns through, for instance, websites or blogs where they expresstheir opinions, and then it can use this information in order to be moreappealing to an increasing number of people. In this work, we study differentscenarios in an agent-based model of cultural dissemination, in which a givenMass Media has a specific purpose: To set a particular topic of discussion andimpose its point of view to as many social agents as it can. We model this bymaking the Media has a fixed feature, representing its point of view in thetopic of discussion, while it tries to attract new consumers, by takingadvantage of feedback mechanisms, represented by adaptive features. We exploredifferent strategies that the Media can adopt in order to increase the affinitywith potential consumers and then the probability to be successful in imposingthis particular topic.