Gerbner and his colleagues have been influential in identifying television as a shaping force in society. Cultivation Analysis helps explain the implications of viewing habits. The theory's heuristic qualities are especially noteworthy. For example, Cultivation Analysis has been applied to crime (Signorielli, 1990), fear of victimization (Sparks & Ogles, 1990), attitudes toward racism (Allen & Hatchett, 1986), feelings of alienation (Morgan, 1986), anxiety (Zillman & Wakshlag, 1985), gender stereotyping (Carveth & Alexander, 1985; Preston, 1990), affluence (Potter, 1991), the aged (Gerbner et al., 1980), American stereotypes (Tan, 1982), civil liberties (Carlson, 1983), divorce (Potter, 1991), materialism (Reimer & Rosengren, 1990), values (Potter, 1993), and health issues (Molitor, 1994; Potter, 1991).

Cultivation Analysis has generated not only much interesting research and some social activism but heavy criticism as well. Some of the complaints are territorial, but many are methodologically and theoretically based. First, the research supporting Cultivation Analysis employs social scientific methods typically identified with the transmissional perspective and limited effects findings. Yet Cultivation Analysis examines larger cultural questions most often raised by humanists. Horace Newcomb (1978) writes, "More than any other research effort in the area of television studies the work of Gerbner and Gross and their associates sits squarely at the juncture of the social sciences and the humanities" (p. 265). By asserting cultural effects, Cultivation Analysis offends many humanists, who feel that their turf has been improperly appropriated and misinterpreted. "The question," writes Newcomb, "'What does it all mean?' is, essentially, a humanistic question" (p. 266). Many humanists, quite at ease when discussing the relationship between literature (novels, art, music, theater) and culture, have great difficulty accepting television as the culture's new, dominant "literature."

According to Newcomb, three problems exist with Cultivation Analysis. First, television's ideas and the symbols that express them on that medium are not created there. Television's representations of things in the culture have history and meaning in the culture that have existed long before their appearance on television. Violence, for example, has always had many meanings for people. Second, Cultivation Analysis ignores the wide variety of "organization and expression of these ideas in the world of television" (Newcomb, 1978, p. 281). In other words, violence, for example, is not presented as uniformly on television as Cultivation Analysis assumes. Third, Cultivation Analysis does not permit the possibility that individual members of the television audience can apply different, individual meanings to what they see on television. As Newcomb argues, "It may be that all the messages of television speak with a single intent and are ruled by a single dominant symbol whose meaning is clear to a mass audience, or to that part of the audience heavily involved with those messages. But I have yet to see evidence sufficient to warrant such a reductive view of human experience in America" (1978, p. 271).

Cultivation Analysis assumes that television's portrayals of such things as crime, violence, divorce, and so on are uniform—an especially weak assumption in the modern era of scores of channels. Cultivation offers two related responses to this criticism. First, although there may be many more channels and people may have greater control over selectivity than they once had, television's dramatic and aesthetic conventions produce remarkably uniform content within as well as across genres. Second, because most television watching is ritual—that is, selected more by time of day than by specific program or the availability of multiple channels— and heavy viewers will be exposed overall to more of television's dominant images.

Additionally, Cultivation Analysis assumes that people view television nonselectively; that is, they watch what's on television rather than making personally relevant selections. Critics regard this as a negative view of people and argue that even if this was true when Cultivation Analysis was first developed, cable television's numerous channels and technologies like the VCR, the remote control, and TiVo give viewers significant power to select. The counterargument is that most viewers, even with dozens of channels available to them, primarily select from only five or six, evidencing a very limited range of selection.

Another concern regarding Cultivation Analysis is that it has done a poor job of clarifying the concept of television's dominance in people's lives. Heavy viewers, for example, may watch very little content that speaks to the issues being examined by a cultivation researcher. Conversely, as W. James Potter (1993) writes, "It is possible for a person to watch very little television and still be influenced by television's messages by picking up those perceptions and attitudes in interpersonal conversations and observing institutions that themselves have been influenced more directly through television" (p. 577). Cultivation Analysis, however, only measures the relationship between the level of viewing and perceptions.

Cultivation researchers respond to this critique by arguing that the issue of television's dominance in people's lives is a transmissional argument. Whether people's perceptions are developed directly from television or from contact with the culture and others in it, it is still a television-dominated environment within which most people exist.

As Gerbner and his colleagues respond to the humanists' complaints about the source of people's views of violence, they remind us that perceptions have to come from somewhere, and television has become our "chief creator of synthetic cultural patterns" (Gerbner et al., 1978, p. 178). Cultivation theorists ask, if viewers do believe that the world is a dangerous place and therefore stay home and watch television, where did that fear come from in the first place?

Criticism aside, Cultivation Analysis has been and remains one of the most influential mass communication theories of the last two decades. It is the foundation of much contemporary research and, as we've seen, has even become an international social movement. Another source of its influence is that it can be applied by anyone. It asks people to assess their own media use alongside their socially constructed reality of the world they inhabit. Imagine yourself as Joyce Jensen preparing to cast an important vote. You may well undergo the same mental debate as she. Yet, think of how even a passing understanding of Cultivation Analysis might help you arrive at your decision and understand your motivations.