China's Mass Media Acculturation Function

Cultivation analysis is one of the important theories in mass media research. It has been guiding the understanding of mass media with TV as its representative. This thesis starts with a general review of this theory, and takes a positive mean to test the applicability of the cultivation assumption in China by taking into consideration the variables of the media mechanism, the states of the audience, cultural background, etc, and investigates the differences of the individuals formed from their interactions with the media, to identify and explore the status quo and functions of the cultivation functions of Chinese mass media.The thesis shows its originality in the following aspects:First, it attempts to take a positive mean to explore the cultivation functions of Chinese mass media and gives a systematic test of the relation between the perceived reality, media reality and the objective reality; investigates media effects on the audience and their outlooks, and comes to the conclusion that the length of watching TV is not the leading factor affecting the cultivation effects and it doubts the applicability of the cultivation assumption in China.Second, it scans all the TV series shown in different provinces in China, does a sample analysis and outlines the violence on screen in China. It takes a quantitative analysis to reveal the direction and intensity of TV violence and simultaneously interprets the meaning of the different indexes form the survey, which provides reliable information about TV violence in China and offers reference for the government policy-making and guidelines for the media development in the right way.What's more, it takes a big-scale cross-regional survey, and investigates the regional differences, media contact and the relationship between age, the degree of education and the outlooks of the audience, emphasizing the constraints of the objective reality and the differences of the individuals on the media cultivation effects, which offers a framework for later related research.