Juliette Lisi

Research:

Group: Juliette Lisi, Linlin Jiang, Aaliyah Desir

Cultivation Theory of George Gebner. Gebner was very interested in everyday social interaction and at the larger sociocultural level. Cultivation as a macrolevel system of explanation about mass media was introduced by George Gerbner (1967, 1969a, 1969b, 1973), who then assembled a research team to help him conduct a series of empirical tests of his system of explanation. By the 1970s other media scholars were attracted to the idea of cultivation and within 4 decades, the cultivation literature grew to well over 500 published studies (Morgan & Shanahan, 2010). This article is a very informative piece that also critiques Gebner. The critiques that are made in the article to summarize assess the value of cultivation theory by heuristic value, empirical support, and precision.

Gebner was not only known for his Cultivation theory but as well as his concept "mean world syndrome which" which is described in an article that discusses Weber and states it as one of Weber's well known concept and is stated as, "Gerbner (1919-2005) was best known for his concept of the "mean world syndrome," i.e., that exposure to television violence cultivates fear and mistrust among heavy viewers." Gebner is well known for looking at society and how media affects it on a larger sociocultural level, through many of his theories and concepts. He is still relevant today as his idea of cultivation theory and concept “mean world syndrome” are used when media outlets are marketing or trying to analyze media today.