Against Media

The nature of freedom, whether you like it or not, is organized diversity. George Gerbner This book is based on the empirical writings of George Gerbner, the legendary dean of the University of Pennsylvania-Annenberg School for Communication, written with the Cultural Indicators Project team, and his books for communication sciences, published in the 1950s but still valid. It was compiled as a selection of his basic theoretical articles by his assistant Michael Morgan and translated into Turkish with the explanatory notes of his student Veysel Batmaz. Is television alone the media anymore? How are we affected by television? Does television increase the tendency towards violence in individuals? What is the difference between television and other means of communication? What is the difference between the world we watch on television and the real world we live in? George Gerbner seeks answers to these questions by numerically analyzing all world television content, especially US television, and measuring the attitudes, views and opinions of television audiences, through a research project that started in 1968 and lasted for 40 years. The "Cultural Indicators Project", which is the most continuous and consistent theoretical and empirical study developed on the world of television, based on the "Gerbner Communication Model", created communication concepts such as Violence Index, Bad World Syndrome, Happy Violence, Mainstreaming and Resonance. George Gerbner changed the content of the traditional discourse about the social and cultural consequences of mass communications. He saved communication science from scientism and positivism with a new approach that evaluated mass communication differently from persuasion and propaganda research. (...) He also advocated the abandonment of traditional concerns and formal aesthetic categories about artistic quality, style, high culture-low culture opposition, selective perception and judgment and interpretations. (...) For fifty years, much of what he wrote conflicted with the dominant paradigms that were fashionable at the time. In his view, any assumption, approach, or style that was widely accepted as "the normal way of doing things" should by definition be viewed with suspicion. "Gerbner evaluated the problem of violence on television differently. (...) Television showed those who were exposed to violence, the victims, rather than those who committed violence. (...) In other words, violence on television showed the power of the powerful, rather than cultivating the perpetrators of violence and threatening the social order. By cultivating (cultivating and nurturing) fear, anxiety and insecurity in people, television may well be creating a climate that creates a need for security that outweighs any residual concern about the violation or elimination of human rights.
-Michael Morgan-
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 496

Year of Printing: 2014


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Details Publications

First Printing Year: 2014

Number of Pages: 496

Language Turkish