 So, welcome friends to this presentation on cultivation theory, one of the most important theories in media and communication from the 20th century and we will have a discussion on George Goebbner's conceptualization and his ideas of the cultivation analysis project and the cultivation theory. So, we are going to basically talk about how cultivation is important, why we have to deal with television effect as a very separate effect from other media and about what are the different aspects of cultivation theory and how it can be represented as mainstreaming and resonance effects. So, basically cultivation theory is different from or is an answer to one kind of media effect theories that was prevalent in the first part of the 20th century when people started talking about media impact or media effects in a systematic manner. So, basically this earlier the researchers were more interested about how specific messages could produce changes in attitudes or behaviors. Later on it was found out that no there was not major changes in attitudes or behaviors there were other kinds of changes but this was one very important development where people started seeing media effect beyond changes in attitudes and behaviors and also there was one another stream of thought which thought that media effect was not very powerful or media was not very powerful it was a very limited kind of an effect because they were looking for those kind of behavioral changes in human beings which obviously wasn't there. So, like the uses and gratification theory which we discussed the other day cultivation analysis was also the response to that limited effects theory that the media effects were in a different direction or they were of a different kind. So, basically this cultivation theory was about how people hold specific conceptions of reality. So, how do they perceive the world or how they perceive the world view and it was found out later on and I will emphasize on that as we go along that their version of reality or what they thought was real was very similar to what television portrayed as reality. So, it was basically about how people constructed their images or their ideas of reality and we will find out in greater details about why their idea of reality was closer to the television idea of reality because television as we know is a combination of news and fiction programs. So, how these news and fiction programs together led people to have a very different view of reality than it actually was or we will talk about the mean world syndrome as well. So, the central idea, the central theme of cultivation studies is that the idea of social reality is closer to the television reality or the idea of reality for heavy viewers of television is closer to the reality which television is portraying. So, the obvious question is why should this be limited to television? There are three reasons and these reasons are generally provided by George Govner himself and this was a project that he and his colleagues started in the Allenburg School of Communication in the late 1960s, we will come back to this. So, these are the three reasons, the first that the overall amount of exposure to television is much more than all the other media and you might agree with some of it although these days we spend a lot of time on the small mobile screen as well but generally the amount of even on small screen a lot of the media that we consume or video content we consume is what could be very similar to the television content as well. So, the first is the amount of exposure to television. The second is that this exposure to television begins even before we start using any other media. So, a small child for example would be watching a lot more television with all those kids program and all rather than consuming any other media. So, that exposure begins before we use other media. Television is much more accessible so it occupies a central place in every house and people consume it a lot more ritualistically that is that point of the time when we will all be in front of the television and also television does not require literacy like print media does. So, television is also different in terms of its centralized mass production and ritualistic use of that coherent set of images or stereotypes that they produce to appeal to virtually the entire population. So, these television images these are all all government's terms they virtually appeal to the entire population. Another term that George government uses is that of representational realism. So, this is one kind of storytelling in which the viewer is convinced that if certain assumptions are true then the events that are taking place there could actually happen in my own life it could happen in reality as well. So, television is different from other media because of the first three reasons I said and then the institutional processes is also the form of content which is representational realism. So, government's theory was based on the observation that much of the socialization takes the form of what is storytelling and we just seen that this storytelling is a representation realism because it convinces us that given certain conditions this is what actually happens in our everyday life or this is something closer to us or this is closer to reality. So, cultivation theory was developed by George government and his colleagues as I said in the late 60s in the Annenberg School of Communication. So, by un-over-emphasizing certain aspects of social reality so in the original version of the cultivation theory George governor and his team they were more interested about the violence on television and as you would remember that much of what passes off as you know the cartoon short kids program there is lots and lots of violence there as well. So, it could be you know even the smaller Mickey and you know the Tom and Jerry shows or those kind of things that you know they are just breaking walls or they are lying flat or somebody is just you know thrown up into the universe even kids programs has a lot of violence. So, this is what their contention was that the violent crime is over-emphasized in television programs and they under represent other aspects of life so that is how television drama affects people's perceptions of reality and as you will understand what one of the weaknesses is that it is not always violent there are so many other aspects also but later on it was adopted or it was adapted to include other aspects apart from violent crime on television. So, these are governor's words so he suggests that television violence or the television view demonstrates or communicates a lot about social norms and relationships also about the goals and means that these should be my goals or these are the means by which I should reach these goals and these are also about the winners and losers so these are the type of people or if you do this you will be a winner or if you don't do this you will be a loser and if you transgress from these social norms you have to pay this kind of a price. So television normalizes or provides us that these are the norms or these are the social norms that we should live by and the television violence is a dramatic demonstration of these social norms so it tells us that how people have to pay for violence or who gets away with violence or when do they get away with violence and why do they get away with violence and how and against whom so this is in government's own words in this 1976 article which I should write at the beginning so that is why the portrayal of television violence has such a greater impact so cultivation is not a direct effect as I said right at the beginning it's not something that you consume content and you change but it's a dynamic ongoing process of interaction among messages and contexts so there are these messages and I have my own context and I draw my own meaning or I frame it according to my own situation so different groups their life situations their world views are different so different people cultivate these effects different differently so it's not a direct behavioral impact as I said or not even a unidirectional effect but it's something which is dynamic and an interactive process so they have a message we have a context and we combine these two and we have our own understanding of the world or it's more of a you know kind of a cognitive impact or a cognitive effect that how does my view of reality change by consuming television content so important that this is a very very different from this is very different from the direct unidirectional effect that the magic bullet theory for example or the mass society theory for example would talk about so it's not linear it's not a unidirectional but it's a dynamic and it is interactive and it also builds on the assumption that this same image you know comes over and over again so that is a cumulative impact so you have some impact you have some understanding today and you see the same image or similar images later on and that's how this cultivation grows so that's why this metaphor of cultivation so this is this materializes by the same images being repeated again and again so that is how you cultivate this effect or that is how you cultivate a world view so cultivation metaphor is used because it's one way to talk about influencing because without talking about effects because if I'm talking about effect then it is like you know somebody dominating the other here we are talking about a social construction kind of a thing we construct the meaning based on our understanding of society and based on the messages that are provided to us so it predicts the long-term formation and shaping of perceptions so it's it says that you know our long-term idea of society about people about situations will will will be shaped by the consumption of these media messages so as you can understand this is a direct response to people who suggested that media has very limited impact because we are saying no media does have very strong impact because when you are suggesting media had limited impact you are assuming that media would cause immediate behavioral change you know cultivation is one one way of suggesting that media can have long-term cognitive changes so these are not short-term behavioral changes but long-term cognitive changes so this again is a very important indicator about media impact but in a very different dimension in a very different paradigm so this was as I said at the beginning a result of the cultural indicators project that these researchers they started at the Annenberg School of Communication in Pennsylvania USA and these were the three questions that these culture this cultural indicators project asked or these were the three questions that they were trying to find out that first the first and the most important that what are the you know constraints or what what what what are the pressures on the media producers people who produce content or the institutions which produce content what are the constraints that you know overgird them or what are the constraints that influences the production of media content not just constraints the processes so how how does how does you know for example our everyday routine of journalism how does it lead to creation of that kind of a media content so these are basically about institutional processes the second thing that the cultural indicators project wanted to answer was that what are the dominant images or what are the dominant messages or what are the dominant values and lessons that are expressed in the media content and the third one which is very close to or which is about cultivation analysis is about what is the relation between the attention to these messages and people's conceptions of social reality so to put it differently the cultural indicators project the first part of it was about institutional process analysis so what are the power structures and the social societal pressures that govern the production of media messages the second was about content analysis and trying to find out that what are the images that are over represented or which type of people are shown to be victims or which type of people are shown to be perpetrators or which type of people are shown to be comical and so on and so forth so this is about the message system analysis and the third and the most important was the cultivation analysis and in this what governor and his colleagues did was that they divided the viewers into three different categories into heavy medium and light viewers and their answers on a number of questions were compared so the questions that they were given the answers were either a television answer means a reality which is closer to the television reality and the other which was closer to the real world as you can understand that this is about three different kinds of people heavy viewers of television medium viewers of television and light viewers of television and they were given questions and they were asked to answer those questions and the answers were either about a television view of reality and the real view or something that was closer to the real view of the world so this was seen that heavy viewers their answer was much closer to the television view and for lighter viewers their answers were much closer to the actual reality so that is what they called the cultivation differential that people who were heavy viewers of television their notions of reality was closer to the television reality and that is the crux of the cultivation analysis or the cultivation theory as such and this leads to what is known as the mean world syndrome which is a direct result of the cultivation theory so heavy viewers of television are more likely to see the world as a scary place as a mean place as a violent place and as a dangerous place so in short they see the world as a mean world kind of a thing so more people viewed the more likely they were to exaggerate the incidence of crime in the real world so if you're watching all those crime programs are on the crime shows of all different kinds then your trust in people will be there will be a lot of you know comedy shows also about you know how people start doubting everybody once they watch too much of those crime patrol and those kind of things so this is very real when people consume a lot of violent content then their idea of the world itself is that okay everybody is so the world itself is a very violent place which might not be true so this is one way of it now Gurbana provides two different explanations for the cultivation effect and these explanations fall into two categories one is about mainstreaming and the other is resonance so what mainstreaming does is that it first of all this is about three B's as you can see the first is that it blurs the traditional distinction between people's views of their words so the distinction between reality and television reality that this is blurred so that is because of this mainstreaming effect it blends their realities into the cultural mainstream so whatever is there in the cultural mainstream that is blended into the television world as well and the third is that television bends that mainstream so the mainstream itself starts believing the television reality so the first is about mainstreaming so using these three metaphors of blurring of blending and bending the cultivation effect happens so those who are heavy viewers they go through this process of blurring through the process of blending and through the process of bending so constant exposure to the same images they develop perspectives which are very different from say for example if they were to be listened to radio all the time so it doesn't happen with radios if it doesn't happen that you know if you listen to a lot of FM music all the time you keep on singing the entire day of course you might be humming that song for some time there are we call them as sound worms there are certain things that we keep on hearing but otherwise the idea of the world doesn't change by you know listening to radio a lot or to you know reading to newspaper content it is traditionally more or the impact is seen more with television and that's because of this mainstreaming effect the second effect is the resonance effect and what is the resonance effect when people see that the things on television are similar to their everyday realities so in a sense whatever is is happening in my real life I see a representation on television so actually since the television world looks like my world so it must be true so this is what happens and this this because it resonates with their actual lives that is why they consider it to be a true representative of all other things so say for example I find the resonance in news for example and then even if I consume fiction then I would assume that okay this is how reality is because a lot of our understanding of society is true television and since we regard this as a very actual representation of reality and one of us as I said is through this resonance effect that is why this impact is so much stronger this is one of the researchers that did and they saw that with heavy viewers it becomes very closer the idea of reality is much closer I'm not getting into the details of all that the last thing that I want to discuss here is about the two different cultivation effects so the first order cultivation effect tells us about facts about say for example that okay say for example it tells us that there is a lot of violence or it tells us that there is a lot of political corruption or tells us that there is lot of crony capitalism or there is a it tells us about you know what can be regarded as facts or about knowledge so these are the probability judgments about the world so in the first order cultivation I get to know that these are the facts okay so political people in high places they might not be trustworthy so this is one of the first order cultivation effect that governor suggests the second order cultivation effect tells us about the values and assumptions that we must have so the first order cultivation effect was about reality the second was about what to do about that so it could lead to say for example okay so we shouldn't trust certain kinds of politicians because they're not trustworthy in the first order cultivation effect they told us they're not trustworthy in the second order they tell us that we must treat them with with disdain for example so it tells us about values and assumptions that that we should regard as useful in first order it tells us only about the fact in the second order cultivation it tells us about these values and assumptions so what are the strengths of the cultivation theory the first strength is that it combines the macro and micro level theories so it talks about the institutional effects and it also talks about the micro level at our level how do we negotiate with that or how do we construct meaning using the the messages that are provided by these institutional factors so this is a major strength that it is not only about micro level it is combining both these macro and micro levels the second is it provides a very detailed explanation of television's very very unique role and as we've just seen the role of television is very different because of certain factors and also because there is a cumulative impact because of these repeated you know broadcast of the similar images so it provides us with a very detailed explanation of television's unique role it also gives us an empirical study of these widely held humanistic assumptions that if you watch something you know and then your your version of truth will be very much closer to that so this is like a humanistic assumption this is true I mean how can anyone doubt that but this provided us this cultural indicators project this provided us with with a view or with a with an empirical structure through which to kind of study these humanistic assumptions it redefines and I've emphasized this earlier as well it redefines effect as more than observable behavioral changes so it's not just observable behavioral change it might be about cognitive changes as well it applies to wide variety of effects issues so it's it can be applied not just to the violent violence on television but it can be applied to wide variety of effects issues it can be about health it can be about education it can be about many other things and it also provides basis for social change and that's because if we understand that this is how the medium works then we might work for for for betterment of society by exposing people to these kind of images again and again so that their version of reality is is closer to what it should be oh there are quite a few assumptions quite a few weaknesses of the theory as well and one of it is that the initially there are a lot of methodological limitations and as I said you know this was something which was not falsifiable so something which is unfalsifiable is not regarded as very scientific the second is that it assumes that television content is very homogeneous so it might not be homogeneous see for example that that wonderful serial called the big bang theory there's hardly any violence there so there there's nothing to suggest that you know it's a similar kind of contents there are a lot of there's a lot about niche contents also which which people consume differently the third weakness is that it focuses more on the heavy users of users of television so there are very many different kind of users so and for them it might not be that much applicable so it's only applicable to heavy users of television as they describe and it is very difficult to apply to media which is used less heavily than television there's a lot of media which is I mean not used as much as television as we said as far as television is concerned there is almost a ritualistic consumption of content it's probably more ritualistic that even religion for example this is something that we do on a very regular basis so if we talk of other media which we do not consume as heavily as as television and if we intend to apply to that then probably this might not be true so thank you so much that's all about cultivation theory