Introduction
In 1964, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication (ASC) elected a Hungarian-American scholar called George Gerbner to be their new Dean. Founded by publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg six years before, the School aspired to set new standards in researching the role of communication in democracy. When Gerbner stood down from the position some 25 years later, he left an institution with a first-class reputation for elucidating the cultural impact of media industries. By then, ASC owed much of its fame to the Cultural Indicators Project (CIP). The CIP was a novel approach to studying media influence. Its central thesis was that media content reflected the prevailing political, social and economic ‘mood’ of the times. The most famed aspect of the CIP was cultivation analysis. Cultivation analysis, conceived by an Annenberg team lead by Gerbner and Larry Gross, alongside considerable input from Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli, presented high-level American policy debates on media violence with a novel argument. Based on content analysis of prime-time TV programming and surveys that compared the social views of heavy and light viewers, the cultivation team argued that TV violence mattered most for its capacity to induce politically exploitable fear. This argument had the strategic effect of turning scholarly and political eyes toward the costs of entrusting global democracy to privately owned media businesses. As we survey contemporary media landscapes, where commercial social media platforms shape everything from elections and terrorism to the micro politics of dating, there’s an argument that Gerbner’s definition of media studies’ defining challenge remains pertinent.
The idea that cultivation theory was born of challenges that still characterise the digital age is the core rationale for this book. What I intend to show is that cultivation theory’s explanation for how media create realities still enlightens the provenance and significance of phenomena like aggressive political communication, frightening new forms of mediated violence, and sexism in popular culture.
In this first chapter, I set the scene for why the development of cultivation theory, under Gerbner’s leadership, is relevant to understanding digital media influence. The sections that follow focus on specific aspects of cultivation theory. Each chapter takes a particular concept, explains why that concept applies to current media challenges, and then models methods for applying these established ideas to digital media case studies. To make this possible, it is first necessary to provide an overview of the main developments and ideas in this body of work. The approach I take in this task is historical. The story of how cultivation theory came into existence is a fascinating tale. Intriguingly, a research model that said harsh things about the social impact of popular culture developed via an unlikely alliance between a scholar and a media mogul. The point of telling this tale is twofold. First, understanding that George Gerbner worked alongside a media industry figure is a useful way to unpack some of the misperceptions about his work. Second, understanding the history of cultivation theory explains some of the strategic decisions that the paradigm made.
Approaching Gerbner historically means regarding him not just as the driving force behind landmark studies of media influence, but also a person who made a difference to communication research as an administrator and ideas broker. Cultivation theory was not the brainchild of Gerbner alone. Yet Gerbner is a unique lens through which we can connect the evolution of media scholarship to significant media and geopolitical changes in the mid- to late-20th century, and indeed, quirks of fate where it is possible to see how things could have gone differently in the field.
Gerbner is remembered as the ‘father’ of cultivation theory due in no small measure to his ability to nurture the institutional and interpersonal relationships that made research happen. His interactions with benefactors, university institutions, media industries (especially US TV networks) and colleagues helped to define what critical communication research is. Like today’s scholars, Gerbner worked in a society that seemed awestruck at a new deluge of media content. Also, like today’s scholars, Gerbner had to defend media studies as a scholarly affair aimed at producing socially valuable knowledge, as opposed to generations of fully trained up media professionals who could slot easily into industry roles.
Unlike most scholars of any period, Gerbner sat in a position of considerable administrative power. Staying there relied upon his capacity to negotiate direct pressure from media and political sources. These pressures intensified during crucial moments in 20th-century diplomatic history, where the connections between global media culture and the post-Cold War political order came into clear relief. When these challenges arose in the mid-1970s, Gerbner became a critical mediator between political, media and scholarly realms. The victories he won (and the battles he lost) revealed essential lessons about the inherent nature of media research, and its positioning vis-à-vis media industries. Within the academy, Gerbner was prominent in seminal conceptual and methodological debates that are worth revisiting, in light of issues raised by social media, convergence and big data. Taken together, Gerbner’s work as scholar, manager and even ‘scholarly diplomat’ builds conceptual bridges between the broadcast and digital eras.
George Gerbner and the Cultural Indicators Project
George Gerbner matters to the history of media scholarship as one of the people who introduced the idea that media actively create social reality. His core argument was that post-war industrialised storytelling was ill-suited to the needs of socially diverse societies. His work on media violence was an elaboration of this theme. Gerbner’s interest in media realities merits noting; while Gerbner earned a reputation as ‘the man who counts the killing’ (Stossel, 1997), his real focus was politics and justice. While it is important to study in some detail his arguments over why media violence was such a problem, it is equally crucial to remember that the violence question was a variation on a theme, and it is the theme that matters most in applying cultivation theory today. To appreciate the current relevance of cultivation theory, one must consider the historical trajectory of Gerbner’s work. This section of the chapter, therefore, explains how Gerbner came to the violence question. As will become apparent, Gerbner hoped his studies on this topic would catalyse public debate about media and democracy.
It isn’t at all surprising that Gerbner would be interested in media violence and the politics of fear, given his journey into North American academia. His biography is detailed by Lent (2005), Morgan (2012) and at the Gerbner archive website at the Annenberg School for Communication (Biography, ND). Born in Hungary in 1919, Gerbner fled induction into the Axis forces in 1939, only to return to Europe via parachute as an elite special forces soldier, tasked with organising Slovenian partisans. Following the war, Gerbner entered first journalism and then education, interrogated by the California House Un-American Commission for suspected socialist sympathies along the way. Surviving this ordeal, Gerbner completed his PhD in the 1950s and moved into academia.
Interested in comparative content analysis, by the early 1960s Gerbner had noticed a distinctly gloomy air around US popular culture. The mass-produced stories that audiences turned to for escape and relief were often sinister parables. So-called confession magazines warned women who eschewed marriage risked terrible fates (Gerbner, 1958b). TV school dramas taught that teachers should quit teaching if they wanted to be happy, otherwise they were doomed to alcoholism and despair. Movies stressed only the lonely could be heroes (Gerbner, 1969). Behind the glossy façade of American popular culture lay some ominous messages; life didn’t go well for the different and the difference makers.
Observing these patterns, Gerbner began to work on the idea that media content was a kind of fingerprint, a trace of the strategies and processes that American popular culture deployed to naturalise social values. Gerbner’s term for these fingerprints was ‘cultural indicators’ (Gerbner, 1969b, 1970, 1972). Gerbner had developed the concept through content analysis and by interviewing those who made and distributed of popular content. Through these methods, Gerbner successfully identified striking anomalies in mass communication processes. Gerbner’s view on the nature and causes of media power was clearly set out in his early confession magazine studies. Gerbner noticed something peculiar about these publications. While the stories inside were lurid tales about terrible fates that befell young women who did dreadful things – like having the temerity to go on unchaperoned vacations – the covers featured demur portraits that gave little clue as to the terrors awaiting the reader inside. Speaking with industry insiders, Gerbner discovered that these covers were designed to placate store owners who were afraid that graphic pictures of suffering women would spoil the buying mood among their female clientele. In noting this quirk of the mass media system, Gerbner established an important principle. Corporate capital ran America’s post-war media system. Equally, one did not have to look too hard to see consumerist ideology in popular entertainment, featuring stories that frequently twinned consumption with happiness. However, this message emerged from less-than-obvious features of complex message systems. Media were no ‘conveyor belt’ delivering elite ideas to audiences. Media content was a kind of puzzle; we could tell what it said, in broad terms. However, why media told some stories, and how those stories affected the political mood of a culture, frequently depended on the little-known quirks of mass production. From the start, Gerbner never believed media power had simple causes. The fact that mass media content was a product, involving many hands in long manufacturing and distribution chains, meant there could never be a straightforward explanation of its power.
By the 1960s, Gerbner believed that the pressing media research questions centred on TV storytelling. Television placed ‘public storytelling’ in the hands of privately owned, profit-oriented media industries. Gerbner thought this integration of culture and commerce was the historical change that created the need for media research. Gerbner did not believe commercial TV was irretrievably anti-democratic. It was more that he was committed to investigating the cultural effects of industrialised public storytelling. As he stated throughout his career, cultivation theory investigated the consequences of living in worlds where public thought depended on mass-produced stories. Media content, so the argument went, was a ‘cultural indicator’ of this new era, where diverse audiences listened to the same voices, more or less (Gerbner, 1969, 1973a).
The political climate in late-1960s America pushed ‘cultural indicators’ toward violence. President Lyndon Johnson established a Presidential Commission on the causes of violence in 1967. The commission tasked Gerbner with creating the first in a series of ‘violence profiles’: content analyses that counted acts of violence contained in a sample of one week’s prime-time and children’s Saturday morning programming. The profiles defined violence as ‘the overt expression of physical force against self or other, compelling action against one’s will on pain of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing’ (Gerbner & Gross, 1976: 184).
At the turn of the 1970s, with the benefit of three years of violence profile data behind them, Gerbner and Gross were ready to turn television and media research on their respective ears. The violence profiles didn’t only count acts of violence; they also recorded who committed violence, who suffered its consequences, and reflected on how these patterns told a ‘story’ about social power. While there were variations in amounts of violence year-on-year, and network to network, the early profiles found a pattern that would persist into the 1990s. There was a great deal of violence on television. However, this violence had a morphology that indicated that this violence carried a social message. When TV characters were violent, they were most likely to profit or get away with it if they were white middle-class men. Women and people of colour were far more likely to be violence victims (Cultural Indicators Research Team, 1977; Gerbner, 1977, 1995; Gerbner, Gross, Jackson-Beeck, Jeffries-Fox, & Signorielli, 1978; Gerbner, Gross, Signorielli, Morgan, & Jackson-Beeck, 1979; Gerbner, Gross, Signorielli, & Morgan, 1980a, 1980b).
Early in the research, Gerbner offered an even-tempered account of what all this meant for American TV and society. To begin, where there had been much work on screen violence as a cause of real aggression, Gerbner suggested that the bigger question was how this violence functioned as a story about how society worked. He initially likened TV violence to pollution: an unwanted, unintended outcome of production processes on which American society had come to rely. Gerbner believed that his evidence offered the TV industry some unpalatable truths: that prime-time entertainment relied on stories that were potentially injurious to societies, because they systematically victimised some social groups. Questions to be asked of TV in the future included: how did production decisions lend themselves to stories that tended to victimise the same people over and over again and what and how did exposure to these stories affect the social perspectives of TV viewers? These were weighty policy issues. Gerbner warned that if evidence continued to show that TV violence was not just entertainment, but a de facto parable on the distribution of social power, then policymakers would have to consider how they could steer popular entertainment in a different direction (Gerbner, 1972).
Fate pushed the violence profiles toward audience research; and indeed, a less sympathetic take on TV. Funding from the National Institute of Mental Health came along with the suggestion of adding survey data to the violence profiles. The idea was to examine how patterned violence affected audience attitudes (Gerbner & Gross, 1976). The move to a method that combined content analysis with survey data gave birth to what became recognised as content analysis. The new objective was to discover how perceptions of social reality were affected by exposure to TV violence.
Cultivation analysis began to make waves from the mid-1970s to early 1980s, via a series of ‘violence profile’ studies, published in the Journal of Communication. Between 1976’s ‘Living With Television: The Violence Profile’ (Gerbner & Gross, 1976) and ‘The Mainstreaming of America: Violence Profile #11’ (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1980a), the ASC team solidified an approach that would confront the widespread conviction that the main danger of screen violence was its capacity to induce copycat behaviour. After ten years of measuring televised violence, Gerbner and his colleagues observed that the industry appeared oblivious to state concerns, as entertainment relied on violence just as much in the late 1970s as it had a decade before. Violence was still something that happened about eight times an hour in peak evening time slots. However, by deploying other methodologies in content analyses and surveys, the ASC team produced a new and provocative argument about what screen violence represented and what it did to those who saw it.
Across the Journal of Communication violence profiles, the researchers came to define violence as a universal story device that acted as a symbolic representation of social power; who had it, and who did not. Violent acts were recorded alongside demographic details of victim and aggressor. This produced victimisation ratios. These numbers compared how often a social type committed violence to the frequency of that type’s victimisation. Victimisation is discussed further in Chapter 3, because in the digital age it has become a source of political power. The violence profiles are therefore a significant part of the ‘backstory’ behind the political storytelling that characterises mediatised digital politics. But for now, the main lessons of the victimisation ratios were that television showed more victims than aggressive villains overall and that while men were more likely to be those violent people, women had a far higher victim to violent ratio. In other words, where women were less likely to start trouble than men, they were still more likely than men to find themselves in the wrong screen time at the wrong screen place, as it were. The same was broadly true for young people, the elderly and people of colour (Gerbner et al., 1978).
As to the effects of these depictions, the combination of content analysis and survey data opened another new line of inquiry, based on a provocative hypothesis. Having noted rampant violence across a medium that had become the mainstay of American leisure, the Annenberg team thought it a good idea to measure if watching TV affected two things: beliefs about social facts, and beliefs about what caused social problems. They did this by comparing the beliefs and attitudes of heavy, light and medium viewers (heavy viewers being people who watched three or more hours of TV per day). For example, one of the violence profiles used a survey of school children, in New Jersey, and found that heavy viewers in that sample were significantly more likely to overestimate the number of times police officers used violence in the course of their duties (Gerbner et al., 1979). When it came to ideas about what the world was like, the violence profiles concluded that heavy viewers were more likely than light viewers to believe that violence happened far more frequently in the real world than was the case, according to crime statistics.
More importantly, these erroneous beliefs about the reality of violence had political correlates. Over the course of their survey work, the researchers also found evidence of what they called the ‘mean world’ syndrome. Survey data suggested that heavy consumption of TV, which could be taken as a proxy measure of exposure to violence, since most programming relied on that entity – one way or another – corresponded with heightened sense of risk and suspicion of everyone from neighbours to governments. Heavy TV viewers were significantly more likely to feel that others could not be trusted, tha...
