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Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
Christ-on-a-bike writes "This article in The Guardian discusses the negative impact of TV on the population of Bhutan. It has only been legal there for four years. Violence, crime and drug use are on the up. Was this inevitable, and what does it say about the influence of TV on Western cultures?" Our previous story about Bhutan talks about the radical impact of television, but without as much emphasis on the darker side.
People learn by example, and with so many bad examples to choose from on TV, it's not surprising that a previously "untouched" culture should be negatively affected.
Sounds like culture shock. Here we have an isolated religiously traditional culture suddenly exposed to new ideas and different lifestyles and we don't expect some kind of shock?
I don't think we're seeing negative elements suddenly overtake their society but the expression of human nature in a very dramatic way. The religious take on the "good life" simply folded for many of them and new avenues of expression opened up. This is the teething stage, soon they'll learn to live with information or, much less likely, crumble under the weight of it.
Culture shock has happened countless times through history. Technological advances, influx of immigrantion, sudden changes in government leadership, etc all contribute to the destabilization of the status quo. Its far too easy to bash television here, its just the medium and whats more important is how the new messages interacts with old messages.
wait until they get GTA3...
"We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school, do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos? Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m."--former president George Bush
If you came and found a strange man teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of your house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."--Jerome Singer
"Television is basically teaching whether you want it or not."--Jim Henson, Muppets creator
I'm not Seth.
Violence, crime and drug use are on the up. Was this inevitable, and what does it say about the influence of TV on Western cultures?
It says what we've always known: that behaviour is heavily influenced by observation. Put a kid in an environment where everyone throws their rubbish in the bin and he'll do the same. Put the same kid in an environment where everyone throws stones at people with red hair and he'll do that too.
Bombard a kid 24/7 with images of guns, explosions and murders left, right and centre and he'll want to join in the action. We learn by repeating what we've seen so it's a natural reaction. Why expect a kid that watches violent cop show after violent cop show to be a perfect angel?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Every week, the letters page carries columns of worried correspondence: "Dear Editor, TV is very bad for our country... it controls our minds... and makes [us] crazy. The enemy is right here with us in our own living room. People behave like the actors, and are now anxious, greedy and discontent."
Is this stupid? Funny? Bizarre? Remember that Bhutan does not follow the same societal traits we are accustomed to in the west. I'd be inclined to see this report in a different light for just that reason.
One of the quotes from My Other Post is
If you came and found a strange man teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of your house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."--Jerome Singer
I'm not Seth.
Do you say that because it is true, or because you want it to be true?
As much as you (or I) may not want to admit that people are effected by television, vidio games, etc, the evidence on the contrary needs to be considered. What if what we are is shaped in part by what happens around us? Should we ignore the possibility of any negative (or positive) affect that entertainment has? Maybe we should be more careful about what we are entertained by.
Oh, and by the way, I do play some FPS games, but I am not going to claim that because I don't want those games to have an effect on me, that they don't. The possibility does exist.
...interesting if true.
Yeah. Really! Watching TV doen't affect your inclination to do what you see others doing while viewing. Sheesh...idtiots. That's why commercial air time is a mult-billion dollar a year industry.
The road to television in Western society was an evolutionary process, and people's mechanisms for dealing with the new media likewise had a chance to incrementally develop. Not only that, but here in the 21st century, we've been part of a television-saturated culture for our entire lives and have reasonably developed very personal, robust and informed means of coping (e.g. media cynicism). So our relationship with TV is quite exceptional and particular to ourselves, and is certainly not a good barometer of the medium's "innate" effect on an arbitrary civilization.
Given that, it very possible that TV's influence on the human psyche is an inherently destructive thing, and that we have simply developed defenses strong enough to glean the good from it.
Is Cable the only thing that's happened in Bhutan in the last four years? Probably not. I would bet that the rises in crime, violence, and drug abuse have more to do with the fact that Bhutan is constantly shat upon by the west, economically at least.
for about four years my parents unplugged the TV. that was basically 8th grade through most of junior year of high school. and to be quite frank those are still my most productive years. i wrote more code and learned more outside of school during those years than i have learned on my own for the last 6... crazy. and i'll add one more thing, the thing that brought my incredible self learning to end was first college applications and then college when i was forced to sit down and be taught rather than exploring and teaching myself...
...
now i certainly played video games during that period so i wasn't completely immune to imitated violence completely, but i certainly kept out of trouble
TV rots the mind... specially in the crucial early years... if your typical day is get home watch 2-4 hours of TV than you are falling behind your potential...
crazy thing is now i use the internet like the TV. i have my "channels" (websites) that i check often, don't really stray that far. and i check them constantly even if nothing has changed. i waste so much time with the internet its stupid. don't get me wrong some things i do are impossible without the internet and when i do use it to research its fantastic...
so i think what's happened to TV will happen to the internet... most content in the hands of a few corporates and nothing really "on" even though we have tons of channels
You are assuming everyone has the same frame-of-mind/state-of-mind/mental capacity/etc as you. There are people smarter than you, and there are people of less intelligence compared to you.
I think this is a common incorrect assumption. Eg.
You do not represent everyone else, and you may not represent the common person in Bhutan either. Plus, society does have a responsibility, I believe, to make some attempt at protecting the impressionable ( eg. kids, mentally incompetant )from acts expressing moral standards that have been found by that society to be below what they think is appropriate.
Step out of yourself for a minute, and understand that your moral standards, and way of life is not acceptable to everyone else.
I bet you think that none of that tv you watch on television "affects" you, right? Most of us do, and I'd bet we're wrong.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
And then again, many of us are not. Look at today's population. Do you spend any amount of time conversing with the "average" person? As a helpdesk tech I spend most of my day explaining assinine things such as "no the computer won't work in a power outage". I even found myself explaining what a power cord was and what it is used for. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who says we should change the amount of sex/violence/whatever on TV. Quite the opposite actually. The way I see it we have two problems: 1) Violent/sexual content on TV 2) People dumb enough to model their lives on said TV content Instead of altering the TV content to suit the idiots of the world, we should be working on reducing the amount of idiots present in todays society. PS: If this post made no sense whatsoever, please disregard it. In typical geek fashion I'm currently running on 2 hours sleep in the last 2 days.
I say let them make their mistakes, let them figure it out themselves, and let them enjoy the same measure of freedom every other nation in the world enjoys. (And hopefully a lot more than that enjoyed by North Korea, Cuba, Syria, etc.) Freedom has a price, but it's a price worth paying.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
There have been the hundreds of studies (laboratory experiments, field experiments, correlation surveys, longitudinal panel studies) all showing a link with viewed violence and violent tendencies.
Bhutan's experience has already been documented in studies in Canada and South Africa, showing that before TV and post exposure to one channel or multiple channels of TV the children in schools became more violent and the increase was in response to the dose (number of channels). (for notes see the book quoted below).
Whenever I hear "there is no proven link" I am always shocked by the extreme ignorance. Who said "the Truth is not as important as repetition"? Was it Goebbels or Stalin? Either way here are some quotes from the book, "Children & Television" 2nd edition, Barrie Gunter & Jill McAleer; Routledge. Chapter 7 pages 92,93...
This was recently reran on my local station, and to be honest, I found it nearly painful to watch. As an individual who finds little redeeming qualities in TV beyond PBS, it was quite sad to see such a community that was doing quite well without the negative influences suddenly have to face a new reality. Although I feel TV has its potential, particularly in the realm of education (hence my favor for PBS) or as an avenue to facilitate political or social change, exporting WWE (or whatever its called now) to the world is hardly the most beneficial aspect of our increasingly interconnected world.
Also, here is the link, well, linked: Frontline: World Also, it has the actual video on the site, as most recent Frontline episodes are, and is worth watching.
Also, for those who have never seen Frontline, or Frontline: World for that matter, I highly recommend it as one of the last bastions of extremely high quality programming, particularly in the realm of journalism which has been so much under assault by the need to have a story make money rather than inform.
forma3
Slashdot put the right spin on it. Kinda.
The Bhutanese government is now considering whether TV has a damaging effect on the people. It's still an open question. But you have to understand that TV has a much greater immediate impact on those people than we're accustomed to.
Kids there have started emulating their favorite stars because they treat the TV stars like they treat anyone else. They don't necessarily understand that TV is a caricature of real life. We understand that now; we now have filters in place that tell us that TV isn't real.
They also haven't gotten accustomed to advertisements. They assume that when a product makes people happy in an ad, it will make them happy, too. So they want more money to purchase that product. Maybe they don't have the means to get that product yet, so they steal. After all, isn't happiness the most important value?
Some people here may assume that this is a good thing. They're becoming capitalistic, and may become productive in the global economy. But that's not the way that people have to be. Our culture just has the means to project that way of life onto others. That doesn't mean that we should.
As the older (non-monetized) economy is disappearing there are many changes in people's roles and in the social hierarchy. Older political hierarchies are also changing as the King is moving the country (with much skill) toward democracy.
It's not just TV.
I wish them the best of luck; they are going to need it to keep their bearings in a more globalized world.
It's not like they have a lot of choice though. At the end of WWII there were three Buddhist kingdoms: Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Tibet has been absorbed by China; Sikkim was absorbed by India. Bhutan is the last one. If they are going to stay independent they need friends; and to have friends means that they need to trade with the outside world. It's a very special place - I hope that they can keep most of their culture while remaining independent.
Let me share a true anecdote: In my first year of college, I took a âoewestern traditionsâ class in which we were one day having a lively debate about the affects of TV/movie violence on society. There were the typical extreme liberals speaking out about how it had absolutely no affects, etc. And there were the typical extreme conservatives with the opposite view.
After a considerable amount of discussion, a young lady (19 or 20 year old) stood up and shared her personal experience on this topic. It turns out she grew up in the middle of no-where New Mexico (or somewhere - I forget exactly where) and there has no broad-cast television in the area, and her parents didnâ(TM)t get a satellite dish. So here whole life growing up, she had no exposure to TV or movies except 2 or 3 times when she was visiting her grandma or something like that. So she goes off to âoethe big cityâ for college, and gets a dorm-mate who watches TV a lot. The first evening in the room, she became entranced with what was happening in the show (some prime-time Cop show if I remember right) and sat and watched. She said that after only 10 minutes of viewing she felt âoeemotionally sickâ, and after about 30 minutes (after watching a few people get shot) she actually threw up! She then said that after living with her roommate for a few months, she only got slightly bothered by such scenes, and after a full year it didnâ(TM)t bother her at all.
I think this (along with all of the studies, etc.) is direct proof that exposure to scenes of violence is âoedesensitizingâ. Does it mean that watching TV will eventually turn her into a killer? Of course not. But it does mean that her âoepsycheâ no longer panics at the sight of violence, and I donâ(TM)t think that it would be too big of a stretch to say that somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind there is a conditioning that thinks assigns less of a âoebadness levelâ than it once did to acts of insult others, curse at others, slapping others, etc..
In the end, this same conditioning is happening to all of us. Luckily, most of us have a lot of counter-conditioning to keep our âoemoralsâ system on the side of still thinking treating someone badly is in fact bad. But letâ(TM)s face it, if we never saw someone strike out in anger, never heard anyone curse at someone else, wouldnâ(TM)t we really be less likely to do those things ourselves? Just like so many studies show that someone exposed to domestic violence as a kid is more likely to inflict it as an adult - our brains simply learn patterns of behaviors. Thatâ(TM)s why weâ(TM)re so good at becoming addicted to things.
I visited Bhutan two years ago. It is a simple Buddhist monastic society with very little contact with the outside world. Tourism is very limited, with only a few thousand visitors allowed into the country each year. Druk Air, the only airline into the country, had only one small airplane. The other had been in England for over a year in repair.
The people are wonderful. Education is a top priority. It is a very peaceful society, but changing rapidly.
The temples do not allow photography inside for fear of providing outsiders of pictorial inventories of the priceless artifacts inside. In the previous year a group of Bhutanese bandits from the east looted a temple, killing the monks who did not escape. This would have been an unimaginable event only a few years ago. Desire for wealth obtainable by selling religious artifacts is overtaking the traditional values of the culture.
Opening a simple, stable, but closed society to western culture through the window of western media and commercial television is an unavoidable disaster. This simple Buddhist culture, with its sane attitude toward the human problem of desire, stands little chance of surviving the desire machine being unleashed there. Western media is the engine of materialism. I fear that western corporate monoculture will win over the minds of youth in a generation. An alternate form of human social existence will be lost.