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The Mean World Syndrome
Media Violence & the Cultivation of Fear
DVD PricingCollege and University: $250.00
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View a Full-Length PreviewLow-resolution preview is strictly for purchase consideration. Not for classroom use.
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Discounted PricingHigh School, Comm. College, Nonprofit: $150
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Digital LicenseLogged in Colleges/Universities may purchase online.
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The Mean World Syndrome
Media Violence & the Cultivation of Fear
A new film based on the late George Gerbner's groundbreaking analysis of media influence and media violence.
Featuring George Gerbner and Michael Morgan
For years, debates have raged among scholars, politicians, and concerned parents about the effects of media violence on viewers. Too often these debates have descended into simplistic battles between those who claim that media messages directly cause violence and those who argue that activists exaggerate the impact of media exposure altogether. The Mean World Syndrome, based on the groundbreaking work of media scholar George Gerbner, urges us to think about media effects in more nuanced ways. Ranging from Hollywood movies and prime-time dramas to reality programming and the local news, the film examines how media violence forms a pervasive cultural environment that cultivates in heavy viewers, especially, a heightened state of insecurity, exaggerated perceptions of risk and danger, and a fear-driven propensity for hard-line political solutions to social problems. A provocative and accessible introduction to cultivation analysis, media effects research, and the subject of media influence and media violence more generally.
Also includes three additional short features -- ideal for classroom use -- that take a closer look at Gerbner's analysis and the Mean World Syndrome.
1. Media as Storytellers: "Nothing to Tell but a lot to Sell" -- Explores the significance of commercial media eclipsing religion and art as the great storyteller of our time. (7:32)
2. A Mean World Case Study: Child Abductions -- Provides an in-depth look at how media coverage of child abductions has fed parental anxieties out of proportion with statistical reality. (4:17)
3. Further Effects of the Mean World Syndrome: Desensitization & Acceleration -- Examines how heavy exposure to media violence normalizes violence, numbing some people to real-world violence even as it whets the appetite in others for ever-higher doses. (8:48)
George Gerbner
George Gerbner was one of the world's foremost authorities on the effects of media violence. After earning a Bronze Star during World War II, he turned to academe, serving as dean of the Annenberg School for Communication for 25 years, presiding over the influential Cultural Indicators Research Project, and later establishing the Cultural Environment Movement, an international organization dedicated to democratizing media.Michael Morgan
Michael Morgan, a professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, worked with George Gerbner for more than two decades. He has published widely on Cultivation Theory; the cultural and socializing effects of television; the international and intercultural effects of mass media; and the effects and functions of new media technology. He is the author or co-author of Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research; Democracy Tango: Television, Adolescents, and Authoritarian Tensions in Argentina; and "Television and the Erosion of Regional Diversity."Filmmaker Info
Written & Directed by Jeremy EarpScript Consultant: Michael Morgan
Produced by Scott Morris
Edited by Andrew Killoy
Executive Producer: Sut Jhally
Co-Producers: Loretta Alper, Andrew Killoy, and Jason Young
George Gerbner Interviewed by Sut Jhally
Camera: David Rabinovitz
Sound Mix: Rikk Desgres, Pinehurst Pictures & Sound
Motion Graphics: Andrew Killoy
Offline Editors: Scott Morris & Jason Young
Media Research: Loretta Alper & Scott Morris
Additional Graphics: Shannon McKenna
Screenings
Pacific Sociological Association annual meeting | Seattle | March 10 - 13, 2011AVANCA 2010 | International Meeting of Cinema, TV, Video and Multimedia | Portugal | July 2010
Film Festivals
Awards
Television Special Mention at the AVANCA 2010Related Links
New Television Rating System Is Extremely Flawed
Is Media Violence Free Speech?
The Man Who Counts the Killings
Reclaiming Our Cultural Mythology
Society's Storyteller: How TV Creates the Myths by Which We Live
TV Violence and the Art of Asking the Wrong Question
Press Reviews
Praise for the Film
"I thought I knew all about how come parents today are so much more afraid than a generation ago. Then I watched The Mean World Syndrome and was blown away! Suddenly all the pieces fit together: Media. Money. Parents. Paranoia. I made my husband come sit and watch with me, it so rocked my world. And I'd like everyone else to watch it, too!"- Lenore Skenazy | Author of Free-Range Kids
"A superb update of MEF's earlier films with George Gerbner. Students in my classes respond very well to The Mean World Syndrome. This film effectively places cultivation analysis into the context of earlier media effects research, addresses television's contribution to our perceptions of race, and emphasizes the crucial political implications of Gerbner's ideas. The Mean World Syndrome is powerful and emotionally moving and I will be using it in my courses."
- Bill Yousman, Ph.D. | Author of Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration
"This smart and timely film explores the life and work of media and communications scholar George Gerbner, who linked media violence to the production of a cultural narrative and mythology and of the perception of a mean world in which people think and act in mean ways."
- Jack David Eller | Anthropology Review Database
