Television viewers have grown 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. 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 is hard to watch television for a few hours a day and not see any violent acts committed. Even children’s Saturday morning cartoons have violence in them. 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 daily see society as being much more violent than it is. He calls this theory Cultivation Theory. Using Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory with the show Law and Order, we can understand how exposure to violence on 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, p. 387). Also, he claims that every weekend, children’s show has 20 acts of violence every hour. He then says that as a result, most children, by the time they finish high school, are exposed to over 13,000 deaths watching television (Griffin, 2005, p. 387). Obviously, in a province like Ontario, there are fewer than 13,000 deaths over 10 to 15 years, which would be the number of years a child watches these weekend programs until they graduate from high school. Therefore, watching violent acts on television can affect how we view our world. Gerbner (1976) believes that television is the dominant force in forming identity (Gerbner, 1976, p. 59). He says that television is a storyteller of reality, and we shape our view of reality based on what we see on television.

To analyze the effect of violence on the audience, Gerbner (1998) argues that there are light and heavy users. He says that anyone watching more than four hours daily is a heavy user. About one-fourth of society comprises this group (Gerbner, 1998, p. 25). Light viewers, he says, watch less than two hours a day. Also, one-fourth of society makes up this group (Gerbner, 1993, p. 33). The other half of humanity is between 2 and 4 hours away. As a result, about one out of four people usually view the world as more violent than it is because they are heavy viewers and are exposed to more violence on television. He calls this the mean world syndrome (Gerbner, 1993, p. 12). Because heavy viewers see more violence than the rest of society, they usually develop certain attitudes that cause them to think the world is terrifying. Gerbner (1993) says four typical perspectives should be analyzed to see the effects of violence on television on a person.

1. The first is the chances of involvement with violence. People who are heavy viewers think their chances of violent involvement are 1 in 10, even though actual statistics show (StatsCan, 2005).
2. The second attitude is fear of walking alone at night. Heavy viewers are likely to be attacked alone at night; this is common among women because women are often shot at night in television programs (Gerbner, 1993, p. 40).
3. The third attitude is the perceived police activity. Heavy viewers think the police crackdown on crime, chasing drug dealers in the streets or shooting stand-offs.

Nevertheless, the Princeton Review notes, “Even in America’s biggest and most violent cities, police officers seldom have to draw their guns, much less fire them.” The fourth and final attitude is a general mistrust of people. Heavy viewers always distrust people. They think people are selfish or up to no good, so they are paranoid. For example, someone might hear two people talking at night and look out their window to see if they are doing something terrible. Because heavy viewers are exposed to all these things, they develop the mean-world syndrome. All four attitudes can be examined in a prime-time series like Law and Order.

In the episode called “Or Just Look Like One,” from Law and Order season one, episode three, many elements explain mean world syndrome. Law and Order is a show about the New York Special Victims Unit. Each episode deals with a violent crime, usually with people getting killed or raped and the cops having to find out who did it. This episode starts with a car approaching a crime scene, getting one of the cops’ attention by honking its horn. It dumps a teenage girl on the ground and drives off.

The girl is a 16-year-old model who was raped and beaten. Her father dropped her off for a photo shoot from midnight until 3 am. From here on, there are many of the four feelings from the cultivation theory.

In analyzing the chances of involvement in violence, we see that she is an innocent 16-year-old girl preparing for a photo shoot. Many teenage models were also at the photoshoot, so it could have happened to them. People would fear that any casual setting may have similar violence to an episode of Law and Order.

In analyzing the fear of walking alone at night, we can see that this model was at a photo shoot from midnight to 3 am. Without watching the end of the program, we would already have theories about what happened to her. We could think that she walked out for fresh air and got kidnapped, or perhaps she was a boyfriend who raped her. Either way, we would eventually fear wandering alone at night just because we kept seeing it on television. We would keep looking behind our backs to see if anyone attacked us.

In analyzing the perceived activity of the police, we observe their actions. Considering that every episode has cops hunting for killers or rapists, and this show is shown every day during prime time, people develop a false view of police activity. We do not see them sitting at their desks and writing reports. Instead, we observe them breaking into people’s homes and arresting and interrogating people. We see them drawing weapons when people run or chase criminals on foot.

Another thing we see is that all criminals captured are guilty and admit to their crimes. In reality, many criminals do not accept their crimes or are innocent, and the courts decide the verdict. Therefore, we perceive police activity to involve using weapons, breaking apartment doors, and chasing criminals daily. Naturally, this only happens sometimes (Princeton Review, 2005).

A general mistrust of people is expected throughout this show. The sixteen-year-old girl overdosed on drugs when she was killed. In this case, the father did not know about this, which led to the perception of the audience, mainly the parents, that their children might be drug users. Naturally, because many young females were at the photo shoot, the police wondered the photographer’s objectives. Perhaps he drugged the girls and raped them. Alternatively, maybe all of the girls were drugging there. All of them denied it, but as an audience, we could think they were lying, believing that many girls could be doing drugs. Another thing is that the photographer kicked out this 16-year-old girl because she was overweight, so she was not invited to the photo shoot as she had told her father, which led to further mistrust of people. Because we do not know exactly what happened until after the show, we speculate on what we think happened. Using our imaginations, we develop all sorts of possible crimes, which make us believe they are common in real life.

We witness reality exaggerated for entertainment in Law and Order and shows like it, such as CSI. People who have experienced a crime can easily have a distorted reality when watching these television shows. Others who have heard of crimes happening to their friends and others

on the news can draw a relationship between the crimes they hear about. This is similar to those in shows like Law and Order. For example, someone may listen to rape and compare the 16-year-old girl in this episode, thinking about how she was drugged and raped. Consequently, this will lead people to believe these crimes are common everyday occurrences, just as they are on Law and Order. Even though we know it is fiction, we can easily understand it to be a depiction of reality. Therefore, Gerbner’s (1976) cultivation theory helps identify why many people view the world as more violent than it is.

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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].