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

Abstract

Day by day, people exchange opinions about news 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 (<em>MM</em>). 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 agent-based 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.