Page 266 - Culture Society and the Media

256 POLITICAL EFFECTS

Table 4: Heavy viewers of TV overestimate violence in society and find the world a mean
place

Source: Adapted from: Gerbner et al. (1979)

colleagues a ‘cultivation differential’, meaning by this the difference supposedly
made by television’s ‘cultivation’ of a certain image of social reality. This
difference is shown in the right-hand column. The table presents the results, not
only for the sample as a whole, but also for a number of separate sub-groups
within it, defined by such characteristics as sex, grade in school, father’s
educational level (signifying the family’s socio-economic status) and media use
habits. It can be seen that in this sample the heavy viewers, regardless of
subgroup, almost always gave the supposed ‘television answer’ in higher
proportion than did the light viewers. Heavy exposure to television, claim the
researchers, indeed results in acceptance of the view of social reality projected by
that medium.
Other scholars are sceptical about these findings. Although their consistency is
impressive, the relationship between television viewing and perceptions of social
reality that they imply is rather weaker than the Gerbner notion of the medium as
a near-sovereign shaper of culture might have led one to expect. Exact
definitions of what counts as a heavy or a light viewer are rarely given in the