Cultivation Analysis

Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, and Signorielli define Cultivation as "the independent contributions television viewing makes to viewer conceptions of social reality.  The 'cultivation differential' is the margin of difference in conceptions of reality between light and heavy viewers in the same demographic subgroups" (p23).   The theory suggests that people who watch television for many hours a day cultivate a view of society and the world consistent with the patterns of television's pseudo-reality (Nacos, 2000). This can lead to an exaggerated belief in the amount of violence in society, racial stereotyping, a belief about who is victimized by crime more, beliefs about what it means to be a certain age, gender, or ethnic affiliation in society, and various other beliefs that can be reflected in television programming.  Cultivation analysis  tries to measure how much television influences a viewer's perception of reality--to what extent does television programming cultivate our understanding of the world (Stossel, 1997).

"Mainstreaming refers to the homogenization of people's divergent perceptions of social reality into a convergent view" (Cohen and Weimann, 2000).  By watching television, viewers learn about facts about the real world.  There are only a limited number of television programs available to the public, and choosing from those available decreases the number of differing images seen by audiences.  As viewers are all exposed to similar images and ideologies, it creates a mainstream, or commonality for perceiving the 'real world.'  Once viewers have learned the 'facts' about the world from the programming they have observed, they then turn outward and compare those perceptions with the ones they experience in the 'real world' on a daily basis.  The extent to which the pseudo world in television programming and the 'real world' are consistent in patterns, images, ideologies, and the structures that support them, resonance occurs.  Resonance reinforces in the viewer the images and facts learned by watching television.  "Thus, real world experiences interact with mediated experiences to create an image of the world" (Cohen and Weimann, 2000).  Cultivation theorists hypothesize that television programming cultivates a mainstream world view that reflects and perpetuates the interests of social and political elites and their stakes in maintaining the status quo, as well as caters to a commercial society whose advertisers try to reach the masses through programming that is very middle-of-the road in an attempt to appeal to larger segments of the population and their shared needs and ideals (Nacos, 2000).

Television programming over-represents violent behavior, crimes, and people in general.  Heavy television viewers, according to cultivation theory, use the patterns and images in television to help create their perception of the world.  With so much violence in programming, these viewers tend to see the world as a more violent place than do light viewers.  This is known as the "mean world" syndrome.  Heavy viewers tend to be overly frightened and cautious of the real world.  The quantity of violence on television encourages the idea that aggressive behavior is normal (Stossel, 1997).  Studies have shown direct correlations of the amount of television watched to the fearfulness of the real world.  Most heavy viewers are in low-income, low-education families, consequently living in poorer, more dangerous neighborhoods.  These are the people who are more readily exposed to real crime, and so their perception of the world is far nastier than that of a light viewer living in a safer neighborhood.  The 'TV world' and the 'real world' violence these heavy viewers are surrounded by resonate, and reinforce the cultivation learned through the patterns and images observed on TV (Stossel, 1997).  Crime coverage's "prevalence in the news bestows an unwarranted importance on it that deflects attention from noncrime issues.  It may also unduly enhance the public's fear of crime and the socially harmful consequences of that fear" (Graber, 1980).

One might argue that if television can have such a strong influence on a viewer's negative perception of the world, then it should work in reverse as well.  First, television contains so much sex and violence because that is what sells in a global market.  Complex plots and dialogs do not translate well into other languages and cultures when selling television shows and movies to other countries, where there are large profits to be made.  Stossel says, "Violence and sex are naturally televisual genres: they're image driven.  Thus there is an overwhelming global marketing imperative in favor of the simple, the naked, and the bloody.  Cheap to

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