Educational Media Reviews Online

Contrary to commonly held assumptions, and despite the increasing amount of time devoted to the web and the growing array of portable devices for accessing it, television viewing continues to rise. According to the Nielson Company’s report for the first quarter of 2010, the amount of time spent watching television is greater than ever. Similarly, Deloitte’s 2009 “State of the Media Democracy” survey indicates a 26% increase in television viewing from the previous year, with watching television ranked by 70% of respondents among their top three favorite media. All of which, among other signs of television’s robust salience, confirms the continuing relevance of the concerns raised by the late pioneering media scholar George Gerbner, on whose analyses and theorizing about the influence of media violence this absorbing and informative documentary is based.

In the 1960s, Gerbner (1919-2005), a longtime dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, developed the Cultural Indicators Research Project, a program to systematically illuminate the relationships between “pervasive cultural trends represented by network television drama and popular conceptions of reality in the areas of health, behavior, and policy.” Mean World Syndrome focuses specifically on Gerbner’s views about how pervasive exposure to media violence affects attitudes perceptions of, and attitudes, towards the real world. The documentary is based on his central idea—the “cultivation hypothesis”—that those who watch more television are more likely to regard the real world according to the themes and messages most recurrent in what they absorb from the world of television.

The production is lucidly narrated by Michael Morgan (Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst), who worked with Gerbner for over two decades, and composed of five sections. The first, “A Tidal Wave of Violence”, delineates how the massive volume of violence in movies, television shows and video games fuses into a normalizing story which distorts perceptions of risk and danger in the world. The second section, “’It’s like the fish in the water…’”, surveys the earlier history of research on media violence, distinguishing the oversimplified view of media violence as directly causing violent behavior from Gerbner’s more sophisticated view of it as magnifying fears and anxieties, and shaping corresponding attitudes and expectations about violence. The third section, “The Mean World Syndrome”, illustrates Gerbner’s cultivation theory by the discord between perceptions of rising violence and rising gun sales, and actual falling crime rates. The fourth and fifth sections, “Mean People” and “The Fallout”, explore further implications of the cultivation hypothesis, such as the media’s promulgation of negative stereotypes of African Americans, Latinos and Muslims, and the domestic politics and foreign policy correlated with it.

Extra features include three short films exploring further applications of Gerbner’s ideas to commercials, media coverage of child abduction stories, and how exposure to media violence immures some people to real violence while raising an appetite for it in others.

Recommended for high school to undergraduate level media studies classrooms.