And In this case, in particularly dialogues between characters and
the representatives of the police, would shape your attitudes.
And after that, this is the TV series which is navigating you through
the difficult situation when you get caught by the police, for example.
Hopefully, it would never happen.
So what are the basic assumptions of the theory?
The technological advancements make storytelling available in a large scale
and the main source is the TV.
Remember it was in 70s and, yes, TV was quite the dominant source of the news,
and source of the entertainment and TV become quite cheap, so
it was everywhere in states, and generally it would go on across the world.
Stories present co-construct.
Stories which are presented, they co-construct our view of the reality.
So we cannot have all the experiences.
We need to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
Mass media at the same time cultivates attitudes and
values which are already presented in culture.
So the people who are making the TV series, they kind of get the information
from somewhere, and this information is just exaggerated, or
it might be shown with a different focus, or it can be just slightly different.
But the high dominating forms of the cultural standards,
they would be reproduced through the mass medium.
Why TV was chosen for the theory?
First of all, it was fundamentally different from any other sources and
forms of the mass media.
It was quite a storyteller and it was interactive more or less,
and I provided and activated as many instances as it was never possible before.
And as well, it was quite interesting to see the dramatic shift as
the television spread really fast and almost 98%,
89% of the American homes had a television by this time.
Still, television has limited effects so these effects can be tracked.
So for the purposes of this research, Gerbner was conducting a very
interesting study while he was tracking how much people are watching TV,
and what their view and perception of the reality is.
First of all, he outlined three categories of the viewers.
Heavy viewers who would watch a lot of the TV,
light viewers who would be just watching slightly, less than ten hours a day.
And moderate viewer, those who can be stuck between those two categories.
So they're not spending too much time, but they're not avoiding television.
After that, he would be comparing the presence of TV
consumption to measuring the cultivation differential,
which brought him to the main conclusion of the mean world syndrome.
So what is that?
That first thing is the people who are exposed to the TV version
of the reality for a longer time, so the heavy viewers,
would have exaggerated belief in a mean and scary world due to the extensive
broadcast of the violent content, which was called the mean world syndrome.
The study was taken in a few steps and the respondents were asked how many
people live in the United States, how many people work in the law enforcement.
And during the week,
what are the chances of yours to be involved in some type of violence?
And should people be trusted?
But as you can predict, the heavy viewers would
significantly overestimate the number of people who work in the law enforcement.
As well as they would underestimate their real life danger
as they consume too much of the violent content.
And they co-constructed their view of the social reality with this content.
So definitely they would not trust much people, but people should be trusted.