Secular Variation of the Amount of Nuclear Information and Its Interpretation by a Media-public Interaction Model

Abstract

Time dependent characteristics of the amount of nuclear information fed by the Japanese press are explained by a nonlinear model with mutual interaction between the media and the public. In the secular variation of that amount since the early 1950s, there appears semicyclicly oscillating fine structure of that amount with a period of several months superposed on a background having a feature of slowly varying wave of information with a period of around ten years. A model is proposed such that an individual media determines its reportorial stance using the response of the public to the preceding information and the general tendency of the other media as measures of judgement. Since the structure of this model resembles to that of an evolving ecosystem, the paradigm shift in nuclear information can be interpreted by analogy with the succession of facies in an ecological system. Moreover, the slowly time-varying waves of information associated with the paradigm shift is found to be grasped as a resultant of prevalence phenomenon if the nuclear paradigm is regarded as a sort of prevalence. The oscillation of the amount of information in a short time scale, on the other hand, is found to appear as a result of the competition between the extent of reflection of the present amount of information to the next information and the extent of reflection of the reportorial state of the other media also to the next information under the existence of public response. Those characteristics regarding the amount of nuclear information are found to come out as necessary consequences of the society with mutual stimulation between the media and the public.

KEYWORDS:

• newsmedia
• nuclear information
• time dependence
• nonlinear model
• public
• secular variation
• paradigm shift
• ecological model
• society
• chaos
• attractor
• oscillation