Cultivation Theory

In this weeks reading we examined what is cultivation theory, which was developed by George Gerbner. He explained that cultivation theory is how television and the things that we watch on TV affects us in the real world. The author of the video we watched described cultivation theory as a fish in a fish bowl. When a fish is in a fish bowl surrounded by water, he does not realize he is surrounded by that water because that is all the fish knows. This is how our society is when it comes to TV. Since we have been exposed to violent types of TV for so long we tend to not realize how it is affecting us because we "know nothing else". It's hard to measure something when there wasn't a starting point that a person was not exposed to the thing being measured, such as violent TV. Violent TV also tends to make society feel a lot of fear and anxiety for what "could" happen. Even more specifically violent TV that contains torture draws a lot of viewers to think that torture works and that it is reasonable to do. With that being said 57% of people believe that torture in real life actually works. TV today also scares us into thinking that torture and violence could happen to us personally. Torture on TV is dramatic and is really just a device used to move the plot a long when watching. People today who watch TV, see violence, and then become scared and do things such as increase security systems around homes, buy guns, and even try to better our government to protect us as a whole from violence. We misinterpret violence because of the way that TV explains it to us.