Theory Application
Using Cultivation Theory to Inspect the Effects of Social Media on Mental Health
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Using Cultivation Theory to Inspect the Effects of Social Media on Mental Health
Yan Mastin
Savannah State University
Using Cultivation Theory to Inspect the Effects of Social Media on Mental Health
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Introduction
The purpose of this theory application paper is to apply George Gerbner’s Cultivation
Theory, which was originally developed to examine the effects of television on the viewer, to
today’s iteration of social media. Cultivation Theory is one of the most popular and utilized
theories in the Mass Communications arena and can be used to inspect the similar long-term
effects of television and social media. This theory implies that the dramatic and often violent
nature of television content breeds a fearful and negative outlook on the world for heavy
viewers. Basically, the theory suggests heavy viewers project the content on the screen into
their own lives often resulting in anxiety about the dark and mean nature of the world.
Someone who prescribes to Cultivation Theory could easily assume social media has similar
effects as television when it comes to altering the “lens” through which the consumer views the
world around them.
Background
As society’s youth becomes more and more enamored with social media outlets, it is
critical to examine the potential repercussions that come with the heavy use of platforms such as
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In the 1970s, George Gerbner and Larry Gross had similar
concerns pertaining to the rise of television viewing in the average American home. Through the
results of multiple extensive research projects, these men concluded there is a “statistically
significant relationship between TV consumption and fear about becoming the victim of a crime”
(Gerbner & Gross 1976). It can be reasonably assumed there are similar perception altering
affects that result from habitual use of social media.
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Since Cultivation Theory was conceived in the 1970s, there has obviously been huge
innovations in mass media including the development of the Internet and Social Media. Despite
originally being developed to explain the marked increase in perceived violence due to habitual
television viewing, this paper will inspect other potential ways that today’s mass media,
specifically social media, “cultivates” society and too what extent.
Similar to television cultivating a misconstrued perception of violence, cultural dynamics,
and appropriate gender roles, there is reason to believe social media cultivates a multitude of its
own misconceptions about reality. The “assumptions about life and the world” that Gerbner was
concerned with are arguably more affected by social media now than by television in the 70s.
Cultivation Theory, which ultimately suggests that the media an audience consumes changes
their perception of reality, is easily applicable to social media despite being developed in the
1970’s because social media is ultimately just another form of pseudo reality.
Social Media is undoubtedly one of the most consumed forms of mass media in human
history and the application of Cultivation Theory to this new form of media allows for a deeper
investigation of how Social Media alters the consumers worldview.
Theoretical Framework
Cultivation Theory, introduced in George Gerbner and Larry Gross’s Living with
Television: The Violence Profile, is a landmark theory in the field of Mass Communications.
Gerbner, who was widely accepted as a brilliant thought leader in the field of mass
communications, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1919. In 1942, he received his bachelor’s
degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. Despite a long career in
communications, Gerbner is most infamous for the part he played in developing Cultivation
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Theory as well as coining the phrase “mean world syndrome” which describes the generally
negative perceptions of the world held by heavy television viewers. Larry Gross, who was a
professor of communications also played a significant role in the development of the Theory of
Cultivation by co-directing the Cultural Indicators Project along with Gerbner to study how
television content influences the viewer’s attitude and behavior.
Cultivation Theory can ultimately be broken down into three separate areas of
scholarship, or prongs. The first of these prongs is Institutional Process Analysis. Institutional
Process Analysis studies the reasons why media companies generate the messages they do. In the
case of the original television study, “why does Hollywood insist on portraying a substantially
disproportionate amount of violence in its content” would be the topic of scholarship.
The second prong is Message System Analysis which studies the actual content and
message of the media. Gerbner used quantitative data to inspect exactly how much violence
takes place in television otherwise known as an Index of Violence.
The third and final prong of Cultivation Theory is Cultivation Analysis. This component
of the theory involves the research that studies the potential correlation between mass media
content and the worldview of the consumer. Staying with Gerbner’s original application of
Cultivation Theory as an example, Cultivation Analysis would inspect how increased television
consumption effects the consumers fear of violence. In Gerbner’s Cultivation Analysis findings,
heavy viewers perceived their risk of experiencing violence to be 1 out of 10 when in reality
their risk level was closer to 1 out of 10,000.
Literature Review
Cultivation Theory was first used to explain the phenomenon of “mean world syndrome”
as it relates to television but has been applied in several other ways since it’s conception in the
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70s. Today, Cultivation Theory has been applied to alcohol use in music videos, potential effects
of video games, hyper sexuality of homosexuals depicted in television, underrepresentation of
women in television and multiple other ways mass media cultivates the preconceived notions of
its audience.
In 2010, Dr. Sara Netzley did her own Cultivation Analysis of television as it relates to
the depiction of homosexuals. Through her research, Netzley concluded homosexual characters
were portrayed as overly sexual. Similar to the cultivation of a more violent world in Gerbner’s
research, her analysis showed that television may in fact cause the viewer to develop the notion
that gay people are more sexual than their strait counterparts. According to her content analysis
of 98 primetime television programs from 2005-2006, “Gay characters on television were more
likely to be shown in sexual situations than straight characters” (Netzley 2010).
A similar study that inspected how the LGBT community is portrayed on television was
conducted by Jerel Calzo and Monique Ward to study how television shows portrayed
homosexuals in a way that reinforces certain stereotypes about LGBT people. Calzo and Ward
ultimately concluded that despite increased representation, gay people in televisio n shows were
shown as one dimensional and tended to be “lacking stable relationships, being preoccupied with
their sexuality (or not sexual at all), and by perpetuating the perception of gay and lesbian people
as laughable” (Calzo & Ward 2009).
Another application of cultivation theory was implemented by Daniel Romer and
Kathleen Hall Jameison when they inspected how television cultivates the audiences’ perception
of women. They concluded that women are actually twice as likely to be portrayed as victims
than men.
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In 2014, Bradley Bond and Kristin Drogos asserted “Exposure to highly sexualized
television programs has been correlated with emerging adults' sexual attitudes and behaviors”
(Bond & Drogos 2014). This example of an application of cultivation theory illustrates how
television can cultivate one’s world view to such an extent that it even changes their sexual
attitudes and habits.
Peoples opinions on sexual orientation and gender are not the only issues that can be
cultivated by consuming television according to a study by Stanford Professor Diana Mutz and
Lilach Nir. According to Mutz and Nir, people’s stance on political policy can be significantly
altered by fictional television narratives. Specifically, both positive and negative portrayals of the
justice system had substantial effects on the viewers’ policy preferences as it pertains to the real
life criminal justice system.
All the previously mentioned applications of Cultivation Theory have used the theory to
analyze the cultivating effects of television in different ways. However, television is not the only
form of mass media that Cultivation Theory can be applied too. In the next examples, Cultivation
Theory has been applied to forms of mass media outside of the medium television for which it
was originally conceived.
A study conducted by Dmitri Williams inspects how video games as a medium has
similar cultivating effects as television. In 2006, Williams studied how the interactive nature of
video games could potentially increase it cultivating effects. He concluded there was in fact a
strong cultivating effect due to the dynamic state that the consumer is placed in when playing a
video game. Another form of mass media that had been studied in relation to how it cultivates
the audience is music videos. A study by Kathleen Beullens, Keith Roe, and Jan Bulck
“examined whether the frequent exposure to music video viewing is associated with driving after
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the consumption of alcohol” (Beullens, Roe & Bulck 2012). They concluded through extensive
surveying of adolescents that “music video viewing is a significant marker of later risky driving
behavior and that this relationship is mediated through their attitudes and intentions” (Beullens,
Roe & Bulck 2012).
Research Question(s)
1. In today’s era when essentially every young person has social media, how does
Cultivation Theory apply to social media as a form of mass media?
2. If Cultivation Theory can be applied, what are the actual cultivating effects of mass
media and how does heavy consumption alter the user’s worldview, mental health and
preconceived notions?
The Case
The assertion that will be presented is that there is significant correlation between social
media use and an overall cynical worldview similar to Gerbner’s “Mean World Syndrome”.
Additionally, social media, as a medium, is just as conducive if not more so than television when
it comes to fostering an environment for Cultivation Theory to be applied.
Cultivation Analysis was defined as the “study of the relationships between institutional
processes, message systems, and the public assumptions, images and policies that they cultivate”
(Gerbner 1970). By this definition, social media is uniquely primed for analysis because it is a
massive message system that bombards the consumer with images and policies endlessly. When
Gerbner was first applying Cultivation Theory to television, his thought process was that the
symbolic content presented in television mirrored the viewers reality which is what ultimately
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gave it cultivating power. Michael Morgan, who also studied Cultivation Theory, likened the
phenomenon to the pull of a gravitational field. He claimed the closer the content was to the
viewers reality, the stronger the cultivating effects were on the viewer. When these qualifications
are applied to social media, it is evident social media has a greater potential to cultivate. Social
media, in essence, is a massive web of avatars that are created to parallel reality.
To compound the issue, people on social media tend to portray their life as more fun and
successful than it really is. In other words, users create a façade of their life that only shows the
good. This constant flow of false projections cultivates an unrealistic standard for the consumer
which in turn leads them to be discontent and dissatisfied with their own life. This phenomenon
can materialize in the form of unrealistic body standards, wealth standards and overall
achievement. For example, a celebrity may post a shirtless photo of themselves to promote their
image as an attractive person but they would never post anything about how painful it was to
reach such an absurd physique. In a similar way, a consumer might only see their friends’ posts
about their recent achievements but never about their setbacks or failures they encountered.
When all of this is considered, it is easy to understand how social media cultivates the consumer
into disappointment with their own life and ultimately depression.
Analysis
The claim made by this paper is that social media cultivates the consumer, specifically
creating anxiety and depression primarily through comparison to the unrealistic portrayals
presented through the medium. According to Cultivation Theory, the power of cultivation comes
from the similarity between the synthetic content presented and reality. By this standard, social
media would make a powerful tool for cultivating the audience since social media is essentially
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just an altered version of reality. There is significant research to back this claim. In a study that
tested US adults ages 19 to 32, there was as significant increase in the odds of depression/
anxiety symptoms among high volume social media users (Shensa, A., Sidani, J. E., Dew, M. A.,
Escobar-Viera, C. G., & Primack, B. A. 2018). In this study, participants were labeled as
"Wired," "Connected," "Diffuse Dabblers," "Concentrated Dabblers," and "Unplugged” similar
to Gerbner’s characterization of television consumers as “heavy” and “light” viewers. Members
of the “Wired and “Connected” groups, which reported the highest social media usage rates,
were 3 times as likely to experience depression and anxiety symptoms.
In another study of 1,000 teens, 41 percent reported feelings of anxiety, sadness and
depression stemming from social media use. The synthetic content that is consumed through
social media is what ultimately creates the mental health issues in the consumer.
When people’s self-worth is formed relative to the well-manicured photos posted on
various social media platforms, it wreaks havoc on their self-esteem. This phenomenon is, at its
core, a perfect application for Cultivation Theory. If you consider the situation, it is evident the
users worldview is being cultivated in a way that makes their own life seem meaningless and
inadequate.
In conclusion, Cultivation Theory can be applied seamlessly to social media because of
its similarity to content. In fact, it may be more fitting for social media than even television
because of social media’s custom nature that creates content specifically organized to mirror the
user’s personal lifestyle. This perfectly refined mirror image of the user’s life creates a unique
stream of media that can have devastating effects on the consumers psyche.
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References
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Romer, D.; Jamieson, K. H.; Aday, S. (2003). "Television news and the cultivation of fear of
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