The number of television viewers has grown a lot since it was first introduced in the early nineteen hundreds. Since then, our demand for entertainment has changed. A few decades ago, musicals and romance films were what the audience wanted. Now, although romance is still somewhat valued, we desire action films with lots of violence, such as Terminator and Robocop. However, violence in television programs seems to be the status quo. It’s hard to watch television for a few hours a day and not see any violent acts commit. Even children’s Saturday morning cartoons have violence in it. Although many believe children copy actions from these programs, similar effects exist in older people. George Gerbner (1976) asserted that people who watch more than four hours of television a day see society as being a lot more violent than it really is. He calls this theory Cultivation Theory. Using Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory with the show Law and Order, we can understand how this exposure to violence in television can make the audience feel that their world is more violent than it is.
George Gerbner (1976) says that “over half of prime-time programs contain actual bodily harm or threatened violence” (Griffin, 2005: 387). Also, he says that just about every weekend children’s show has an average of 20 acts of violence for every hour. He then says that as a result, most children by the time they finish high school observed over 13,000 deaths by just watching television (Griffin, 2005: 387). Obviously, in a province like Ontario, there are a lot less than 13,000 deaths over a period of 10 to 15 years, which would be the amount of years a child watches these weekend programs until they graduate from high school. Therefore, watching this many violent acts on television can affect the way we view the world we live in. Gerbner (1976) believes that television is the dominant force in forming identity (Gerbner, 1976: 59). He says that television is basically a story teller of reality, and we shape our view of reality based on what we see in television.
To analyze the effect of violence on the audience, Gerbner (1998) says that there are light and heavy users. He says that anyone who watches more than four hours a day are regarded as heavy users. About one-fourth of society makes up this group (Gerbner, 1998: 25). Light viewers, he says, are people who watch less than two hours a day. Also, one-fourth of society makes up this group (Gerbner, 1993: 33). The other half of society is in the middle, between 2 and 4 hours. As a result, about one out of four people usually see the world as being a lot more violent than it really is because they are heavy viewers and are exposed to more violence in television. He calls this the mean world syndrome (Gerbner, 1993: 12). Basically, because heavy viewers see more violence than the rest of society, they usually develop certain attitudes that cause them to think the world is a really scary place. Gerbner (1993) says there are four typical attitudes that should be analyzed in order to see the effects that violence in television has on a person. The first is chances of involvement with violence. People who are heavy viewers think that their chances of being involved in violence are 1 in 10, even though actual statistics show (StatsCan, 2005). The second attitude is fear of walking alone at night. Heavy viewers think that they have a high probability of being attacked when alone at night. This is common in women because women are the ones who are often attacked at night in television programs (Gerbner, 1993: 40). The third attitude is perceived activity of police. Heavy viewers think that police are always cracking down on crime and chasing drug dealers in the streets, or even involved in shooting stand-offs. But in reality, the Princeton Review notes, “Even in America’s biggest and most violent cities, police officers seldom have occasion to draw their guns, much less fire them.” The fourth and final attitude is the general mistrust of people. Heavy viewers are always suspicious of people. They think that people are selfish or up to no good and so they can be a bit paranoid. For example, someone might hear two people at night talking and they would look out of their window to see if they are going to do something bad. Because heavy viewers are exposed to all of these things, it causes them to develop the mean world syndrome. All four of these attitudes can be examined in a prime time program of Law and Order.
In the episode called “Or Just Look Like One,” from Law and Order season one, episode three, there are a lot of elements that explain the mean world syndrome. The show Law and Order is about the daily lives of the Special Victims Unit of New York. Each episode deals with some kind of violent crime, usually with people getting killed or raped and the cops having to find out who did it. In this episode, it starts with a car going up to a crime scene, getting one of the cop’s attentions by honking its horn, and then dumping a teenage girl on the ground and driving off. The girl is a 16-year old model who was raped and beaten. Her father dropped her off at a photo shoot that occurred from midnight until 3am. From here on, there is a lot of the four feelings from cultivation theory.
In analyzing chances of involvement with violence, we see that she is an innocent 16-year old girl who was just going for a photo shoot. There were a lot of teenage models who were also at the photo shoot and so it could have happened to any of them. People would fear that any casual setting may have similar violence as if they were immersed in an episode of Law and Order.
In analyzing fear of walking alone at night, we can see that this model was at a photo shoot from midnight to 3am. Without watching the end of the program, we would already develop theories as to what happened to her. We could think that maybe she walked out for some fresh air and got kidnapped, or maybe she was a boyfriend who ended up raping her. Either way, we would eventually develop a higher fear of walking alone at night just because we keep seeing it on television. We would keep looking behind our backs to see if anyone would attack us.
In analyzing perceived activity of police, we see the actions of these cops. Considering that every episode has cops hunting for killers or rapists, and that this show is on every day of the week during prime time, people develop a false view of police activity. We don’t see them sitting at their desks and writing reports. Instead we see them breaking into people’s homes and arresting and interrogating people. We see them drawing their weapons when people attempt to run, or chasing criminals by foot. Another thing we only see is that all the criminals they capture are guilty and admit to their crimes. In reality, a lot of criminals don’t admit to their crimes, or perhaps they are even innocent, and the courts decide the verdict. Therefore, we perceive police activity to be mainly involved in using their weapons, breaking down apartment doors, and chasing after criminals on a daily basis. In reality, this does not happen often (Princeton Review, 2005).
A general mistrust of people is common throughout this show. The sixteen-year old girl was found to be overdosed on drugs when she was killed. The father did not know about this, leading to the audience’s perception, mainly the parents, that their children could be doing drugs. Also, because there were a lot of young females at the photo-shoot, it caused the police to wonder what the photographer was up to. Perhaps he was drugging the girls and raping them. Or maybe all of the girls were doing drugs there. All of them denied it, but as the audience we could think they are lying, causing us to think that a lot of girls could be doing drugs. Another thing is that the photographer had kicked out this 16-year old girl because she was a little overweight, so she was not going to the photo shoot as she had told her father, which leads to further mistrust of people. Because we do not exactly know what actually happened until after the show, we keep speculating on what we think happened. Using our imaginations, we develop all sorts of possible crimes, which cause us to think that they are common in real life.
In Law and Order, and shows like it, such as CSI, we see a reality which is over exaggerated for entertainment purposes. People who have experienced a crime happen to them can easily have a distorted reality when seeing these shows on television. Others who have heard of crimes happen to their friends, or to other random people in the news can draw a relationship between the crimes they hear and the crimes they see in shows like Law and Order. For example, someone may hear of a rape and may draw the comparison to the 16-year old girl in this episode, thinking about the way in which she was drugged and raped. This will eventually lead people to think these crimes are common everyday occurrences, just as they are on the everyday episodes of Law and Order. Even though we know it’s fiction, we can easily understand it to be a depiction of our reality. Therefore, Gerbner’s (1976) cultivation theory helps identify why many people view the world to be more violent than it really is.
Bibliography
Gerbner, G. (1993). “Miracles” of communication technology: Powerful audiences, diverse choices and other fairy tales. In J. Wasko, Illuminating the blind spots (pp. 130-150). New York: Ablex.
Gerbner, G. (1993). Growing up with television: The cultivation perspective. In J. Bryant, & D. Zillmann, Media effects: advances in theory and resarch (pp. 140-160). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gerbner, G. (2003). Television Violence: At a Time of Turmoil and Terror. In G. Dines, & J. Humez, Gender, race, and class in media: a text-reader (pp. 339-349). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Griffin, E. (2005). A First Look at Communication Theory (6th Edition). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Statistics Canada. (2007, March 27). Crime and Justice. Retrieved March 24, 2007, from Statistics Canada: http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/ind01/l2_2693.htm
The Princeton Review. (2006, April 12). Police Officer/Manager. Retrieved March 24, 2007, from The Princeton Review: http://www.princetonreview.com/cte
Wolf, D. (Director). (2002). Law and Order: “Or Just Like One” [Television Series].
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