At the start of the fifties, hardly any US home had had a television set. By the end of the decade they nearly all did. It was much the same in Britain and across the developed world.

Freed from the austerity and pessimism of the war years millions of ordinary families saw the technological miracle of TV as a sure sign that life really was getting better. They were wrong: it was about to get worse.

Emerging in the U.S. is remarkable new evidence of how television has profoundly undermined society’s traditional values and standards. Carried out by Harvard University, the research shows that as TV has become the drug of choice for an increasingly fast and self-occupied world, traditional family activities have disappeared, participation in local affairs and community life has collapsed and a damaging cult of “get-out-of-my-face” isolationism has taken hold.

In just 40 years, say the Harvard researchers, TV has not only stripped away much of our essentially gregarious nature, but demolished the social fabric and common interests that have held communities together for centuries.

Cocooned in their catholic world, people no longer know their neighbours, friends or even families. They don’t vote, they don’t socialize, they don’t think and most of them don’t care.

Can all this be the fault of television? In a speech to the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, Dr. Robert Putnam, Dillon professor of International Affairs at Harvard, argued forcefully that it is. He painted an ominous picture of a society so helplessly glued to, and enslaved by television that it can no longer function in a normal, co-operative way.

Television, he argued, has dammed the natural flow of human contact that builds friendships, neighbourhoods and, ultimately, nations. Millions of  modern, comparatively well-educated people barely speak to strangers outside work and shopping trips. As a result, one of the most precious resources – simple human trust – has been all but eradicated.

“Trust and civic participation are the cornerstones of democracy,” said   Dr. Putnam. “Sadly, our stock of social capital has been badly depleted over the past 40 years. The social fabric is becoming visibly thinner. We don’t trust one another as much because we simply don’t know one another as much.” The reason,” said Dr. Putnam, “is just a click of the remote control away.”

“Television has made our communities wider and shallower,” he said. “ It enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social benefits associated with other forms of entertainment.”

“The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and of the movies by the video recorder.”

Millions of people, whose parents and grandparents considered it second nature to be concerned with local and national affaires, now display only a tangential interest in life outside their living rooms.

They have become suspicious, reclusive and increasingly uninterested in the way their communities are run. As people have come to depend more on TV’s inevitably superficial coverage of news and current affairs, a semi-institutionalized culture of ignorance has begun to appear.

More then 60% of U.S. families don’t buy books. Blissfully moronic movies that celebrate ignorance, such as Dumb and Dumber, are all the rage. 30% of population think Bosnia is somewhere in Africa.

From the early Seventieth to the present day, the number of Americans able to say they have attended a meeting on public, town or social affairs in the past years has almost halved. Participation in parent-teacher associations has fallen from 12 million in 1964 to only seven million.

“Every year over the past decade or two, millions have withdrawn from the affairs of their communities,” said Dr. Putnam.

At every level of education Dr. Putnam found a direct, negative connection between the number of hours of television people watch and their willingness to take part in group activities. By the same token, those who watch TV most, are least likely to trust others. Television watchers are suspicious, skeptical, socially inept and inclined to think the worst of others.

“By contrast, the more you read newspapers the more trusting you are,” said Dr. Putnam. He found that for those born before World War II, community activity- from joining groups to voting in elections – is a strong and responsibly-held ethic. In 1950, only 10% of U.S. households had a TV set. By 1958, it was more than 90% and the collapse of trust and participation has been accelerating ever since.

In seeking to establish the cause of what Dr. Putnam calls “the profound undermining of civic culture” over the past four decades, many other possibilities were considered, including sky-high divorce rates, the exodus from the cities into the suburbs, the flood of women joining the jobs market and the simple speeding up of modern life.

But nothing, argued Dr. Putnam, provides so compelling an explanation as the growth of TV and the strain of selfishness, distrust and isolation that it has bred. “It has “privatized” and “individualized” our leisure time, disrupting the opportunity for social contact,” he said.

For more and more of television’s helpless, captive millions, the message of the age has become: plug in, switch on, drop out.

William Langley. Sociology, 2000

Functional vocabulary

 

сocoon n	кокон
сocooned adj	скрытный, замкнутый, скованный
gregarious adj	общинный, общительный, коммуникабельный
moronic adj	глупый, бездумный, идиотский
inept adj	неспособный, неуместный
ominous adj	зловещий, устрашающий, угрожающий
reclusive adj	затворнический, отшельнический
a reclusive lifestyle	затворнический образ жизни
recluse n	затворник, отшельник
tangential adj	зд. поверхностный

 

 

Language focus

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