Mean World Syndrome: The Three Types Of Mass Media

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Many people in today’s world watch television on a daily basis. There are three types of television viewers which are light viewers, medium viewers, and heavy viewers. Mean World Syndrome focus on individuals who fall in the heavy viewer category of television watching. Some common themes and issues that we see on television that portray the world to be mean are rape, murder, terrorism, and communal riots. Television has been noted to fill your mind with negativity about the world and bombard your mind with negatively manipulated images in order to give you a distorted reality. Gerbner believed that violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it is. His thoughts and beliefs led to the …show more content…

Gerbner also believes that due to the technologies we have current today, television programs especially the news tends to make the world seem even more intimidating and deceitful to the viewer’s mind. New technological innovations that we have today such as DVD players, VCR’s, and cable, are able to widely expose and emphasize the violence of the world. Although they do not interfere with the cultivation theory, they actually allow more access and spread recurrent messages to the viewer. It has been noted that Mean World Syndrome has the potential to cause heavy television viewers to overestimate the chance of experiencing violence, believe that the neighborhood they reside in is unsafe, say fear of crime is a serious personal problem, and assume the crime rate is rising. Other studies like the 1930s behaviorism show the widespread effects that mass media has on viewer’s ideas on

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