Cultivation at 50

Cultivation is a prominent and prolific theory in communication research, one that articulated new theoretical parameters and became the focus of intense national policy debates during the field’s formative era. As cultivation reaches its 50th anniversary, it is fitting to review the storied biographical provenance of the theory, the yin and yang of its intellectual internecine conflicts, the evolution of the theory’s development with the addition of core mainstreaming and resonance concepts, extensions through empirical illumination of psychological processes, and replication in different contexts, but, most saliently for today, the gnawing question of whether and how cultivation can be adapted to a time that is vastly different from the television-dominated era that spawned the theory. In this milestone paper, we take stock of cultivation’s assumptions, controversies, and conclusions, but do so through the lens of a historical, sociology-of-knowledge approach and empirical, meta-analytic informed review of research, in the end pondering whether this classic theory, with television as its conceptual cynosure, can be usefully applied to the multitudinous 21st century media milieux whose fragmented audiences and personalized content differ so greatly from the TV era, yet intriguingly share cultivation’s fundamental emphasis on the power of industrialized storytelling.