Violence and Cultivation Theory: A Case Study

Abstract

Since the 1950s, television has been not only the most prominent of all mass media, but also a defining element of modern life. Television’s institutional structure and technology, as well as its programming, have seen immense changes, yet it remains the source of our most widely shared cultural stories, images, and lessons. Its importance and centrality in our lives are enhanced by new technologies (such as on-demand, online streaming, and mobile devices) that make television easier to watch whenever and wherever we want. Nevertheless, as a society, we continue to have concerns about the effects of its portrayals of violence, sex, gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes, the family, medicine, politics, health, nutrition and weight, drugs and alcohol, mental illness, and much more (Bryant, Thompson, & Finklea, 2012; Singer & Singer, 2012). Violence, in particular, has been a focus of concern since television entered our lives (Ferguson & Faye, 2018; Friedrich-Cofer & Huston, 1986; Gentile, 1983; Strasburger, 2014); thousands of studies have been conducted and Congress has held more than two dozen hearings on the topic.

This chapter discusses the question of television violence from the perspective of cultivation analysis, which was developed by George Gerbner (1919–2005) as a new way to explore the effects of television. Growing up in prewar Hungary, Gerbner was struck by the way the folk stories and songs of peasants in the rural Hungarian villages both reflected and recreated their particular ways of seeing the world. Later, as a young scholar in mid-20th century America, he was similarly struck by the fact that the cultural process of storytelling had undergone a profound transformation. No longer handcrafted and passed on face-to-face, folktales were now being mass-produced by commercial conglomerates and mass-consumed to a historically unprecedented degree. Gerbner devoted his career to investigating how these manufactured stories both reflected and shaped the culture that produced them (Morgan, 2012).