Page 59 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

48 GERBNER ET AL.

Similarly, we are still imbued with the ideology of print culture and its
ideals of freedom, diversity, and an active electorate. This ideal also
assumes the production and selection of information and entertainment
from the point of view of a variety of competing and conflicting interests.
That is why many also resist what they assume to be the emphasis of cul-
tivation analysis on the “passive” viewer and the dissolution of authentic
publics that this emphasis implies. They point to what they see as serious
differences between cultivation theory and more recent excursions into
reception models of mass communication (see McQuail, 2000). From the
reception perspective, it seems logical to argue that other circumstances
do intervene and can neutralize the cultivation process, that viewers do
watch selectively, that program selections make a difference, and that how
viewers construct meaning from texts is more important than how much
they watch.
We do not dispute these contentions. The polysemy of mediated texts is
well established. From the cultivation perspective, though, to say that
audiences’ interactions with media texts can produce enormous diversity
and complexity does not negate that there can be important commonalities
and consistencies as well across large bodies of media output. To explore
those commonalities, as cultivation does, is not to deny that there are
indeed differences; similarly, the examination of differences need not (and,
arguably, cannot) deny the possibility of shared meanings in a culture.
Polysemy is not limitless, and preferred readings can have great power.
To glorify or privilege only the fact of polysemy is to risk removing any
vestige of articulatory or determinational power from the text—and
thereby to render culture impotent as well. Equally, concentrating on indi-
vidual differences and immediate change misses the profound historical
challenge television poses not only for research strategies but also for tra-
ditional theories of democratic government. That challenge is the absorp-
tion of diverse conceptions and attitudes into a stable and common main-
stream. Thus, although individual viewers will certainly differ (and differ
substantially) in their “reading” of any given television program, cultiva-
tion does not ask people what they think about television texts, much less
any individual text. Rather, cultivation looks at exposure to massive flows
of messages over long periods of time. The cultivation process takes place
in the interaction of the viewer with the message; neither the message nor
the viewer are all-powerful. In a sense, cultivation looks at the “master
text” composed of the enduring, resilient, and residual core that is left
over when all the particular individual and program-specific differences
cancel each other out.
Thus, cultivation does not see television’s contribution to conceptions of
social reality as a one-way, monolithic “push” process. The influences of a
pervasive medium on the composition and structure of the symbolic envi-