Social Reality Theory

2016 Words9 Pages

Gerbner (1998:198) defined cultivation as “the independent contributions media viewing makes to an individual’s conceptions of social reality.” This theory explains how an individual’s perception of social reality can be changed if they perceive the real world according to what they viewed in the media, or especially on television (Holstrom, 2004:197). Morgan and Shanahan (2010: 337) described the media as indoctrinating a woman’s opinion of her body image over time through repetitive and frequent viewing. Levine and Smolak (1996:250) stated that the continual repetition of certain values, as well as the exclusion of certain types of people, actions and stories powerfully influences and adapt viewer’s conceptions of social reality. Tiggemann …show more content…

Markus (1980:64) clearly recognised that a person’s self-concept is built on knowledge. However, if one looks at the unlimited variety of information that is available to a person at any point in time about themselves it is important to be selective in terms of what information in the environment one should attend to. Markus (1980:115) stated that the information appearing to have unequalled power in grabbing one’s attention in one’s life is usually self-relevant information. He also refers to this as self-schemata, and it is also known as salient identities (Stryker, 1987:25) or core conceptions (Russel, Cahill and Spain, 2014:322). Jung and Lennon (2003:28) stated that the manner to which women are satisfied or dissatisfied with their bodies depend on their level of appearance self-schema. According to their study an increased negative mood and lower body image scores were obtained from women with a high-appearance schema than from those with a low appearance self-schema. The schema theory also believes that one’s understanding of the world demonstrates an interaction among “what is really out there” and what one is taken along to the perception situation (Jung