Concept
message system analysis
The second prong of Cultural Indicators: systematically counting and tracking recurring patterns in media content (who appears, what they do, what they do to whom).
Message system analysis is the second prong of Cultural Indicators: systematically counting and tracking the recurring patterns in media content. Gerbner and his team code who appears (demographics), what they do, who does what to whom, and which relationships and images repeat, under headings such as violence, minorities, gender roles and occupations.
The aim is not to interpret a single programme but to describe the total “world” that television builds. This description is called the “television world”, and it determines what the “TV answer” in cultivation surveys corresponds to. Sampling: in Cultural Indicators, one-week samples from the prime-time and weekend daytime fiction programmes of the American broadcast networks have been recorded every year since 1967.
There are applications in Turkey too: for example, Özer and Jafarli (2024) first carried out a message system analysis of the prime time of Turkish channels and then built their survey on these findings. In Turkish both the spellings “mesaj sistem çözümlemesi” and “mesaj sistemi çözümlemesi” are seen. The place where this prong meets the viewer is cultivation analysis.
Example
Coding the proportion and occupations of female characters, and who harms whom, in a week of prime-time series.