What Art Does on processing new ideas:
Soap operas, for example, are good places for this kind of social conversation. They provide a safe, neutral space through which sensitive topics can be broached and discussed. And they are pretty much universal.
They often become important centers of national and even international conversations.
In Hangzhou factory workers bring each other up to date with episodes of the soaps they missed due to revolving shift patterns. In Trinidad, a few neighbours might show up when the soap starts. In Egypt, some families sit down together after the Iftar meal to watch the Ramadan soap operas. A Rwandan soap opera that aimed to improve inter-ethnic relationships was found most successful when the audience listened to it in a social setting: they discussed what happened afterwards and later reported more positive inter-ethnic attitudes.
It's a way for people to take the local cultural temperature. By discussing the developments in their favourite soap opera they're adjusting themselves to the new realities in their societies, and they are thinking about it from the position of all the characters involved in the soap opera. They are jointly involved in thinking something through, about which they can develop their own feelings, because it's fictional.
And of course, art can prod people in one direction or another. A show can aim to worsen inter-ethnic relationships. Still, it is true that people will process things via art that would be a nonstarter for them in the real world.