George Gerbner (1919 – 2005) was considered a seminal thinker in the area of television studies.
He worked as a professor and researcher at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois from 1956 until 1964. He went on to teach at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and stayed till 1990. In 1990, he founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media.
He passed away on 24 December 2005 but left a lasting legacy.
He said that people are no longer learning about their cultural identity from their families and communities but from “a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell.” No doubt he was referring to the television networks.
He was concerned with the “mean world syndrome“, a phrase he coined which refers to “a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place“.
Fearful people, he postulated, are more easily manipulated and controlled to accept or even welcome repression in order to ease their insecurities.
He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content. It also analyzes how those changes affect viewers’ perceptions of the world.
Take a deeper look at George Gerbner and his thoughts about television with these 3 AV titles available at ACRC. Excerpts taken from Media Education Foundation:
The Electronic Storyteller
Gerbner outlines, in a comprehensive and clear fashion, the way in which the universal storytelling function of human societies has been colonized by corporate media in the modern world. Making a distinction between “effect” and his own theory of “cultivation,” he explains the role the media environment plays in how we think about ourselves and the way the world works.
Call No. H562974 [DVD]
The Killing Screens
In contrast to the relatively simplistic behaviorist model that media violence causes real-world violence, Gerbner encourages us to think about the psychological, political, social and developmental impacts of growing up and living within a cultural environment of pervasive, ritualized violent images.
Call No. F511099 [VIDEOTAPE]
The Crisis of the Cultural Environment
Gerbner delivers a stinging indictment of the early construction of the “information superhighway,” sharing his predictions, based in the logic of globalization, of what he thought would become of the Internet and other new media.
Call No. G572203 [DVD]
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