ACRC

	Hai jiao qi hao [videorecording] = Cape no. 7 Wei, Desheng. Distributed by Poh Kim Video Pte Ltd, 2008. Call No: C578488
	The band wagon [videorecording] Minnelli, Vincente Turner Entertainment, Co. , 2005. Call No: J578415 DISCS 1-2
	Il Generale della rovere [videorecording] Rossellini, Roberto Criterion Collection, 2009. Call No: C578460

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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]

Preview Trailer

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]

Preview trailer

Alper, L., Leistyna, P., Asner, E., & Media Education Foundation. (2005). Class dismissed how TV frames the working class [videorecording]. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation,.

Call No: D572174
Location: Business Library

Excerpt from Media Education Foundation:

Featuring interviews with media analysts and cultural historians, this documentary examines the patterns inherent in TV’s disturbing depictions of working class people as either clowns or social deviants — stereotypical portrayals that reinforce the myth of meritocracy.

Class Dismissed breaks important new ground in exploring the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect with class, offering a more complex reading of television’s often one-dimensional representations. The video also links television portrayals to negative cultural attitudes and public policies that directly affect the lives of working class people.

MEF has a short trailer of this video and I’m embedding it here.

Excerpt from MEF website:

Jean Kilbourne continues her groundbreaking analysis of advertising’s depiction of women in this most recent update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series.

In fascinating detail, Kilbourne decodes an array of print and television advertisements to reveal a pattern of disturbing and destructive gender stereotypes.

Her analysis challenges us to consider the relationship between advertising and broader issues of culture, identity, sexism, and gender violence.

Available in the NTU Library
Call No.: K511042