Cultivation+Theory



A Few Words From The Founder:

"Most of what we know, or think we know, we have never personally experienced. We live in a world erected by stories. Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and offer models of conformity or targets for rebellion. They weave the seamless web of our cultural environment. Our stories used to be hand crafted, home made, community inspired. Now they are mostly mass-produced and policy driven, the result of a complex manufacturing and marketing process we know as the mass media. This situation calls for a new diagnosis and a new prescription." (Gerbner, 1999) ....Sound familiar?



The Cultivation theory attempts to measure the cultural effects on society from long term exposure to the similar characteristics present in television programming. In the United States, cultural and societal values were once based on face to face sharing of stories and personal experiences. These stories were constructed from all viewpoints of members of society. Since the industrial revolution, our society's stories are no longer shared in this way. ..... 

The stories are manufactured from a marketing standpoint and distributed through mainstream television. Society is now in a time where most of our waking hours are spent ingesting information through media. Television is the medium through which majority of these mass-produced messages are broadcast to communities, distributing more than any other medium in history. In an average American household the television is in use for somewhere around 7 hours per day. Gerbner's cultivation theory focuses on the system of television broadcasting and patterns within, not just particular programs and themes.



Studies of cultivation not only measure types of programming watched, but also the amount of television viewing done by the prospects that are being surveyed. Those prospects may be any in a span of ages, including children, young adults, and mature adults. Studies have found that children of young ages are most susceptible to cultivation of knowledge through the television medium.

The following images illustrate exactly how much we rely on mass media and the amount of time we spend using it. 

The United States is not the only country where cultivation is present. There have also been studies done in other countries such as the Soviet Union, England, and the Netherlands. In these studies, the relationship between heavy viewing and understanding of violence in society were weaker than in the U.S, but programming is also differentiated as well. Areas where more programming is imported from the United States may show more cultivation of these ideas present in American television.