Page 56 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

3. GROWING UP WITH TELEVISION 45

Compared to other media, television provides a relatively restricted set
of choices for a virtually unrestricted variety of interests and publics.
Even with the expansion of cable and satellite channels serving ever-
narrower niche audiences, most television programs are by commercial
necessity designed to be watched by large and heterogeneous audiences
in a relatively nonselective fashion. Moreover, the general amount of
viewing follows the lifestyle of the viewer. The audience is always the
group available at a certain time of the day, week, and season. Viewing
decisions depend more on the clock than on the program. The number
and variety of choices available to view when most viewers are available
to watch is also limited by the fact that many programs designed for the
same broad audience tend to be similar in their basic makeup and appeal
(Signorielli, 1986).
In the typical U.S. home, the television set is in use for about seven
hours a day. The more people watch, the less selective they can be (Sun,
1989). The most frequently recurring features of television cut across all
types of programming and are inescapable for the regular viewer (Sig-
norielli, 1986). Researchers who attribute findings to news viewing or
preference for action programs and so forth overlook the fact that most of
those who watch more news or action programs watch more of all types
of programs, and that, in any case, many different types of programs,
including news, share similar important features of storytelling.
What is most likely to cultivate stable and common conceptions of real-
ity is, therefore, the overall pattern of programming to which total com-
munities are regularly exposed over long periods of time. That is the pat-
tern of settings, casting, social typing, actions, and related outcomes that
cuts across program types and viewing modes and defines the world of
television. Viewers are born into that symbolic world and cannot avoid
exposure to its recurrent patterns, usually many times a day. This is not to
claim that any individual program, type of program, or channel (e.g., fam-
ily programs, talk shows, sports networks, cooking channels, news chan-
nels, violent films, and so on) might not have some “effects” of some kind
or another; rather, it is to emphasize that what we call “cultivation analy-
sis” focuses on the consequences of long-term exposure to the entire sys-
tem of messages, in the aggregate.

CULTURAL INDICATORS

The Cultural Indicators project is historically grounded, theoretically
guided, and empirically supported (Gerbner, 1969, 1970, 1972a). Although
most early studies focused on the nature and functions of television vio-
lence, the project was broadly conceived from the outset. Even violence