hello and welcome to my easy-to-understand guide to george gerbner x' cultivation theory this is quite a simple theory to understand for a level students this is a theory which says that the media generally tends to repeat representations of people or groups of people over and over again and that the effect of those representations on an audience builds up slowly but surely over time so I'm gonna explain this if you were to see for example a group of people being represented as violent and aggressive in the media if you saw it once you might ignore it you might think well I don't really believe that's the case in real life but if you see that representation repeated over and over and over again in newspapers in TV programs in films then eventually as an audience member you might start to believe that that's actually true the effect of that representation is going to be bigger on you you're going to start to maybe accept it as realistic and you're going to do that because it's been ingrained into your brain over days months years seeing lots and lots of the same thing so Gardner believes that these repeated representations cultivate or grow our ideas they change our perceptions they might change our behavior over time and also what they do is they create an idea in society of what is mainstream of what our dominant ideologies so if we start seeing more and more representations of people in the media in a positive way for example and over time bit by bit slowly but surely perhaps society's perceptions of that particular social group may become more positive as well and that will then become the dominant ideology in society