Living with Cultivating Messages

How are our conceptions of social reality affected by messages from television? Most cultivation studies addressing this question focus on media effects. However, this book adopts a new perspective and examines cultivating messages themselves. The book addresses what messages are and how uniform messages differ from genre-specific messages and metanarratives. It brings together different perspectives and introduces a new concept, coined 'subgenre messages', which takes into account the shift towards online television in the media landscape. The book’s computational simulation study shows how some message concepts are more similar than others. Finally, subgenre messages emerge as the most robust in the face of bias.