Cultivation Theory and Science

Cultural Indicators

Gerbner's cultural indicators approach asserted that television, which emerged as a mass medium in the 1950s and was almost ubiquitous in households by 1970, has taken over as society's storyteller. This occurred because television was uniformly present in households and was watched more than any other medium. The average U.S. resident watches about 3 hours of television per day. In the 1960s, a lack of diversity of channels meant that everyone was being offered about the same mix of programs. Even in the current media environment with more than 200 channels offered to many, the actual programs and program types viewed are about the same.

These are three aspects of the cultural indicators framework:

• 1.
  Institutional process. This investigates the systematic pressures and constraints that affect how media messages are selected, produced, and distributed. Gerbner was concerned that media messages are being created by commercial companies with a marketing and profit motive and that the result has been stories that promote products and present images designed to draw, hold, and sell to audiences.
• 2.
  Message system analysis. This quantifies and tracks the most stable, pervasive, and recurrent images in media content. In this context, content analysis methods of selected weeks of television offerings are analyzed in terms of the underlying themes or stories they tell.
• 3.
  Cultivation analysis. Surveys are usually used to measure the extent to which television viewing contributes to audience members' conceptions about the real world. To the extent that viewers regard what they see on television as portraying reality (television reality) rather than actual reality, a case can be made that television is having long-term impacts on the stories people learn. These television perceptions, in turn, cause people to change behaviors.

The primary application of the theory has been focused on television and violence, due in large measure to societal concerns in the late 1960s and 1970s about the impacts television might be having, especially on children. Gerbner and colleagues received substantial research funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and other funders that enabled them to develop and test cultivation theory in this [Page 199]specific area. Later, the theory was applied to a number of other areas, including gender, age, the environment, health, and science.

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