Most of what we know, or think we know, we have never personally experienced. We live in a world erected by stories. Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and offer models of conformity or targets for rebellion. They weave the seamless web of our cultural environment. Our stories used to be hand crafted, home made, community inspired. Now they are mostly mass produced and policy driven, the result of a complex manufacturing and marketing process we know as the mass media. This situation calls for a new diagnosis and a new prescription. Notes Earlier versions of parts of this essay were published in Culturelink, August 1996, and Nieman Reports, Fall 1996.
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George Gerbner (1999) studied this question.
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