Here is the man himself, the myth, the legend, talking about his theory. This was produced in the mid 90s by the Media Education Foundation out of UMass Amherst. It's a trailer for a 1/2 hour educational video called "The Electronic Storyteller."
Most profound in the video for me is Gerbner's notion that we do not learn from specific acts or shows, but from recurring plots and characterizations--what he calls "casting" of social roles. Griffin focuses on the violence and mean world aspects of the theory, but this video also emphasizes race and gender roles as cultivated by TV.
Of course, this theory and its supporting research was developed through a time when home entertainment was dominated by the TV, and most people had 3-6 Broadcast stations to choose from. I wonder, do you think the Internet cultivates distorted perceptions of the real world? Is their a "mainstreaming" effect that happens with Internet users? Are their prominent portrayals of certain people in certain roles doing certain things that a majority of people on the web see over and over in different sites everyday? How could we study it?
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