Do you live in a Real world?

Cultivation Theory Analysis

How real is your reality? Do you find yourself becoming anxious as your walking through a parking lot at night? Or how about when youre home alone and the doorbell rings? Chances are most everyone has experienced this sense of anxiety or fear, but why? The things we view on television have shaped our perspectives on life. How can something that seems so harmless and at times entertaining be affecting how we live, think and act each and every day of our lives? The imaging and unrealistic scenarios have become the norm of everything we see on TV, that we as a society have come to believe that they are real; which has caused many to live in an unrealistic world and disregard real life all together. Through the dynamic medium of television, one man discovered the underlying cultural toxicity TV is seeping in to every home and in to every person who entertains in front of the television screen.

George Gerbner was a man of intellect. Born in Hungary in 1919 he took an early interest in folklore and excelled as a poet. As a student he won many awards in literature however he was forced to flee to Paris to avoid being drafted in to the military. He traveled all around the world hoping to end up in America where he had family and he was fortunate enough to sail there even though he didnt have a visa at the time. George quickly transferred to Berkley and studied journalism but shortly after he was drafted in to the U.S military where he served and was deployed on many missions; including one that landed him back in Hungary.

George Gerbner always had a love for writing and when he returned from duty he volunteered to be a newspaper editor. During that time he gained teaching experience as a professor of journalism at the Pasadena City College, while he finished his masters and obtained his Ph.D. Gerbner spent many years as a professor, and the Dean of Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and founder for the Cultural Environment Movement.

The cultivation theory is a social theory which examines the long-term effect of television. The primary proposition of cultivation theory states that the more time people spend living in the television world, the more likely they are to believe social reality portrayed on television. This cultivation leaves people with a misrepresentation of what is true in our world.

George Gerbner was extremely concerned with the influence television was having on people and their lives. He claimed that heavy television users develop an exaggerated belief in a mean and scary world. George Gerbners counter theorist, Marshall McLuhan believed that the media medium was being used as a message delivery system; Gerbner believed that TVs power came from the symbolic content of the real-life drama shown hour after hour, week after week.

George Gerbner, a long side Larry Goss, founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content and how those changes affect viewers' perceptions of the world. Its database has information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters. The purpose of the Cultural Indicators project was to identify and track the 'cultivated' effects of television on viewers. They were "concerned with

the effects of television programming (particularly violent programming) on the attitudes and behaviors of the American public.

George Gerbner stated that people no longer learn their cultural identity from their family, schools, churches and communities but instead from "a handful of conglomerates that have something to sell. Gerbner believed that the influence media had on ones mind was so damaging that it created a sense of unrealistic reality. This unrealistic version of life causes many to live in a sort of fantasy land where the images and the sense of worry follow them throughout their everyday lives.

Gerbner coined the phrase "mean world syndrome," a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place. Gerbner states:

"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures," he testified before a Congressional subcommittee on communications in 1981. "They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities. That is the deeper problem of violence-laden television." Gerbner best sums up the epidemic of this cultural controller in an article that was published in 1994 in the Ecology of Justice, titled Reclaiming Our Cultural Mythology. For the first time in human history, children are hearing most of the stories, most of the time, not from their parents or school or churches or neighbors, but from a handful of

global conglomerates that have something to sell. It is impossible to overestimate the radical effect that this has on the way our children grow up, the way we live, and the way we conduct our affairs. People think of television as programs, but television is more than that; television is a mythology highly organically connected, repeated every day so that the themes that run through all programming and news have the effect of cultivating conceptions of reality. (Gerbner, pg 40)

As he states in his article, people believe that television is simply just a program, a way of entertainment. Gerbner could see the underlying messaging and meaning within television programs, their consistent nature, and causing us to form habits by what we are watching, experiencing and then using in our daily lives. Gerbner goes on to explain the distorted concept our realities and it all comes down to violence. Most of the violence we have on television is what I call happy violence. Its swift, its thrilling, its cool, its effective, its painless, and it always leads to a happy ending because you have to deliver the audience to the next commercial in a receptive mood. (Gerbner, pg 40) Gerbner didnt just focus on television as the sole instigator in this cultural controller but he considered the amount of time people were dedicating to watching television each day and how an allotted time made the difference in the perception of reality. Gerbners studies have shown that growing up from infancy with this unprecedented diet of violence has three consequences, and is ultimately known as the "mean world syndrome.

What this means is that if you are growing up in a home where there is more than say three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world and act accordingly than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television. The programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. Another consequence of watching a lot of television is that one comes to believe that the violence portrayed on television is normal that everybody does it, and that its a good way of solving problems. (G. Gerbner pg 40)

For example, everyone has seen a scary movie a time or two. It seems that the plots are usually the same, they carry the same sense of urgency creating that false anxiety over something not actually occurring in real life and they leave you with extreme paranoia that something terrible will happen to you tonight when you go to sleep. These are the consequences of the influence television creates in the innocent lives of people. Violence is often portrayed with a comedic undertone, making us believe that hitting someone over the head is funny or pushing someone down the stairs is great! Women and children are often portrayed as helpless and abused; which takes a real life issue and makes it seem acceptable and the norm. Television de-sensitizes viewers to victimization and suffering; they lose the ability to understand the consequence of violence. The third consequence, and I think the most debilitating one, is the pervasive sense of insecurity and vulnerability. Our surveys tell us that the more television people watch, the more they are likely to be afraid to go out on the street in their own community, especially at night. They are afraid of strangers and meeting other people. A hallmark of civilization, which is kindness to strangers, has been lost. That sense of insecurity and vulnerability is not

randomly distributed. For every 10 violent characters on television there are about 11 victims; thats basically a tooth for a tooth. But for every 10 women who exert that kind of power because violence is a kind of power there are 16 women victims, of young women there are 17; of women of color there are 22. (G.Gerbner, pg 40)

The mean world syndrome results in a reduced sensitivity to the consequences of violence along with an increased sense of vulnerability and dependence. Television is instilling fear in people and making them feel as if they are next to be victimized. What we have created as an entertainment medium has done so much more damage than good. The primary objective of the media to sell goods is legitimate in a limited sphere, but it should not drive the entire culture. We have to recognize and implement the right of a child to be born into a more diverse, more fair, more sane, more equitable cultural environment. (Gerbner, pg 40).

Much attention has been paid to the amount of time Americans spend watching television. Cultivation theory has been important in exploring behavioral effects of television viewing for many years. However, psychosocial health has received much less scrutiny in relation to television viewing time. This investigation examined the hypotheses that television-free individuals and viewers adhering to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations (up to 2 hr of viewing per day) would display a more positive psychosocial health profile when compared with more frequent television viewers. Results confirmed the hypothesis for women, but not for men. The analysis showed that moderate television viewing, as defined by the AAP, provides a similar relation with psychosocial

health as being television-free. (J. Hammermeister, Health Communication Vol. 17, Iss. 3,
2005)

Television and mass media have always been a way of communication, but over the years things have changed. Television was once seen as a way to see the news, and be more up to date with social issues on occasion. Although that is still true, TV has changed drastically with its shows, movies and messaging. And the reason being is that more Americans are spending more and more time each day avoiding real life and catching up on their favorite shows with the fear they will miss out on something; this is known as FOMO. FOMO, according to JWTIntelligence, is the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that youre missing out that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you (A.Dykman, Forbes)

Because of the influence TV can have on people it has opened up a whole new realm of psychological disorders such as FOMO and higher risk for diseases, all this by manipulation and communication via television. Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that too much TV time was associated with increases in the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and heart problems and the risk of death from any cause. Hus study, which analyzed data from eight large studies conducted since the 1970s, didnt explicitly say why TV time was associated with poor health, but the potential connections are no mystery. Excessive TV watching is related to decreased physical activity, increased consumption of health foods, and increased caloric intake, says Hu

With all of the studies done and all of the ground work done by Gerbner you would think people would realize that there is a true danger behind TV. The only way to solve the issues and

limit the manipulation and allow people to live in the real world would be to limit the consumption of TV and the amount of time spent focusing and investing our lives in front of one. That may be easier said than done, given Americans seeming obsession with TV. Many people, especially kids, dont just limit themselves to the television set; theyre also watching on their mobile devices and computers. That makes TV a hard habit to break, but one that may ultimately save lives.

So where do we draw the lines on cultural consumption? Do we take back raising children good morals and values in to our own hands or do we simply hand over the remote? Do we choose to live in the real world or do we remain entertaining the fantasy life with the unrealistic expectations that can either control our lives or ruin them completely. Managing the time you spend watching television is entirely up to you, but do not forget that TV has not always been around, and there are other mediums of entertainment that are valuable in teaching real life lessons.

Works Cited

Park, A. (n.d.). Watching TV Can Lead to Early Death | TIME.com. Health & Family | A healthy balance of the mind, body and spirit | TIME.com. Retrieved July 31, 2013, from http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/15/too-much-tv-watching-linked-with-disease-andearly-death/#ixzz2aZScoRI8 Cohen, J. & Weimann, G. (2000). "Cultivation Revisited: Some Genres Have Some Effects on Some Viewers". Communication Reports, 13(2), 99. Dykman, A. (2012, March 21). The Fear of Missing Out. Forbes. Retrieved July 29, 2013, from http://forbes.com Gerbner, G. (1994). Reclaiming our Cultural Mythology. The Ecology Of Justice, 38, 40. Hammermeister, J., Brock, B., Winterstein, D., & Page, R. (2005). Life Without TV? Cultivation Theory and Psychosocial Health Characteristics of Television-Free Individuals and Their Television-Viewing Counterparts. Health Communication, 17(3). Retrieved July 29, 2013, from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207 Miller, K. (2005). Communications theories: Perspectives, processes, and contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill. PRESS, T. A. (n.d.). George Gerbner, 86, Researcher Who Studied Violence on TV, Is Dead - New York Times. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Retrieved July 31, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/obituaries/03gerbner.html?_r=0 Park, A. (n.d.). Watching TV Can Lead to Early Death | TIME.com. Health & Family | A healthy balance of the mind, body and spirit | TIME.com. Retrieved July 31, 2013, from http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/15/too-much-tv-watching-linked-with-disease-andearly-death/#ixzz2aZScoRI8