Overview

The earliest questions explored by cultivation analysis revolved around televised violence. Dozens (if not hundreds) of other studies have also, of course, dealt with this issue over several decades. Congressional investigations and hearings, boycott campaigns, debates over family viewing times, content ratings systems, and the V-chip, along with periodic news items about dramatic cases of apparently imitative violence have all kept public attention focused on the problem. As is evident today, these questions have never been adequately resolved. Partially this is because of the failure to acknowledge the implication of cultivation, which is that televised violence is not something that can be solved by tinkering with a few problem programs. Rather, the early research in cultivation argued that television has to do with lessons about social power. These lessons applied not only to violence but also to a broad range of interwoven issues that touch on race, gender and class.

But more than anything else, cultivation's early empirical research focused on how violent messages could be important to the social outlook of “heavy viewers.” Issues such as “the mean world syndrome,” mistrust, perceptions of who is victimized and who isn't, were all early concerns of cultivation research. This was a sea change from the focus of other research which had been rather exclusively placed upon documenting specific impacts, particularly the imitation or stimulation of violence.