Gerbner Cultivation theory

• Media generally tends to repeat representations of people or groups of people over and over again and the effect of those representations on the audience builds up slowly over time.
• Gerbner believes that these repeated representations cultivate or grow our ideas and they change our perceptions and behaviour over time, and they also create an idea in a society of what is mainstream and the dominant ideologies, so if we see more and more representations of people in the media in a positive way as an example, slower over time societies perceptions of that social group may become more positive and that will become the dominant ideology in society.