measure the effects of a force that is present from the start a sea of images is media scholar marshall mcluhan like to say that has become so familiar to us that we're often as blind to its all encompassing presence as a fish is to water. like a vision of water we don't know who discovered water but we know it wasn't a. medium a pervasive environment is always beyond perception we have become so accustomed to our culture. it's like a fish in it doesn't know that it's swimming in water because it has never experienced anything else this leads us to the notion of cultivation cultivation is a stable system of messages and images that shape our conception of the world in the end of life itself with. our. the question is do you measure cultivation this is a research problem that we faced and we resolved it in the following way we give service to large groups of. representative respondents the surveys have a series of questions not about television not about media but these are questions about life question about security question about values question about attitudes for example we asked them what

some time ago, marshall mcluhan said that the medium is the message and that is more true today than ever. media have proliferated and they now permeate our society. we're surrounded by it constantly 24/7 and users increasingly are defining what the media are and what those media mean to the rest of us. and mark, why is it important for the media to really understand addiction, treatment, and behavioral health? i think as doug just said, it's 24/7, people rely on the media to get their information and, as the media reaching out, people are forming opinions, ideas, attitudes about what they think about addiction and mental illness based on what they're seeing on these tv shows or seeing on the internet or hearing on the radio. so if what they hear is accurate, they'll be forming accurate opinions and able to help themselves or help other people who are dealing with these issues. if they hear inaccurate information, it proliferates stigma, the discrimination, and all the unfortunate circumstances people with addictions or mental illness find themselves in as a result of miscommunicatio

i mean, we have been told all the time since marshall mcluhan about the message.the message on the people with influence and therefore with power. i would like at this point to hear from you folks. at t herom yoave a question please come to either one of the two microphones, but i want to make b as you do that, of what tomi, make one other point which is terribly important to me. other when this country was formed we had newspapers that were highly partisan. there were newspapers that were created by a particular party or institution, and the newspaper r supported the party. that was it. it was only there for that onett purpose of supporting that one l party. it t was not there to give you e rty.. that only developed in the ned-19th century. the latter part of the 19th century we had owners9 encouraging reporters to just hd come up and create a war between spain and america. that would be a marvelous thing betw because it would increase the circulation in new york.n inew r the real what i would regard, anyway, as the area, the time in anay as history where we had