Cultivation Theory

As a kid, growing up in Philadelphia violence was everywhere, but as a child I didn’t realize it. I lived with my grandma who was a heavy television watcher. She knew we lived in a bad neighborhood, and her watching TV all day didn’t make things any better. Everything she saw on TV was real to her. I really was a light TV watcher because I played sports all day long. When I would leave the house, my grandma would watch me until I was out of her sight. She would not let me walk at night by my self, and she didn’t trust some of the people I hung around. She once told me, “If you’re not back in ten minutes, I will call the police. You know the station is just around the corner.” That is an example of cultivation differential theory. I thought she was so caught up in the mainstream of the media; it gave her a bad case of the “mean world syndrome.” In reality, it was just that we grew up in two different time eras. In the shows she saw on TV really happened when she was growing up, like in one episode of CSI Miami when a killer threw his victim in the swamp. That made her remember the gruesome death of Emmitt Till. I didn’t really realize how bad the world was until a few summers ago when over 100 people got killed in the area where I lived. I even saw a young man get shot and his insides were hanging out of him. So when I hear of people getting shot and killed on the news, I often think of what I saw with my own eyes, something I learned is called resonance, or the mechanism that affects heavy viewers who have already been victims of violence.