It is said to be a theory composed originally by G. Gerbner and later expanded upon by Gerbner & Gross. They started out the theory with the study of media effects and how it affects us. Specially the people revolving around the media and how they influence people by their “fame”, “role”, “projects”, and “advertisements”. Do they create a new idea for the everyday people? if so, how do they do that?

In my understanding, G. Gebner wanted to know how watching media specifically in our televisions somehow cultivate how we live our lives. How do celebrities get famous? they should fans, even haters or bashers. How do products get endorsed? they use the most trending celebrity to play a part in their commercial — they even send free products to those actors or actresses so that they still can talk about the product with posting selfies and pictures on social media (preferably Instagram and Facebook). Being informed and updated with what’s on going in the television, is good but like everything else, having too much of it will have permanent negative effects. Heavy viewers tend to be more negative around the world. As they are more exposed to violence that creates their world view to be more far worse with everyone. Unfortunately, they create hypocrite comments because they just see the danger in everything. Also, heavy viewers tend to depict the media world as somehow their “real world”. With the development of all the ideas, imagination, and situations created in the televisions, they enforce it with the real world and they find it accurate in every way which is wrong. It’s like watching chick flicks! Whether you like it or not, a romantic love story from the movies can’t happen in real life. May or may it not be based on real life; the production of that movie was tweaked in order to make the story more interesting than real life relationships — that makes a lot of people have high expectations and standards on their partners. They base actions on what they prefer to compare it with.

If you’ve noticed in our country’s theme of telenovelas, it mostly has love triangles, mistresses, babies switched by birth, twins that didn’t know they had a twin, and so on. Unfortunately, even I enjoy watching them but they show how Filipinos are and what entertains us. We go for love stories over the informative one. (Glad that FPJ’s Probinsyano is making a difference with giving us social issues and life problems in their show) But us, Filipinos wouldn’t want a love story without fights about another person just stepping in the picture. No matter how many times we say that we know what’s going to happen, we know the ending, we know the climax that’s going to happen, we still wouldn’t want to trade watching that. My point is, it makes Filipinos exposed to the scene of mistresses. It makes us see third parties to be normal and not immoral that much. If I were to ask strangers, my friends, my relatives, a lot would answer that their families have broken up because of a failed relationship because of another woman or man. Luckily, like me, I have a lot of half-brothers but our whole family isn’t broken up and isn’t mad at each other.

There’s a conceptual model of theory and it starts from:

– TV Viewing (learning while watching tv) to

– Incidental information (construction of a new learning that mixes basic morals and information with the one’s we watch) to

– Social Reality (issues and problems) to

– Inference skills, social structures, other experiences (that is also colliding with construction)

and another bonus part of the model:

– Capacity, focusing strategies, attention, involvement

The model also explains a research related to what I said on top that the viewers will see the world to be much more dangerous. All the information opened a lot of fear, specially for the social oriented youth that sees a lot of thieves, rapists, kidnappers, killings, and drugs out of everyone that isn’t healthy because of the television.