A TED Talk from Cynthia Schneider about “Idol TV” reminded me of a paragraph from Niel Stephenson’s In the beginning was the command line:
We [Modern Western Culture] seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
That was from 1999. Here is her talk, given this year. (If you don’t see it, you can watch it here.)
(And on a related note, China is coming to grips with race issues because of a mixed-race contestant on it’s own Idol Show.)
I love the fact that Hollywood, which is blamed so for so much of what’s wrong in the world, is actually changing the world for better* in more powerful ways than many “direct” approaches such as NGO’s or military action.
*In this case, “better” meaning more democracy, and the general spread of concepts like equality and human rights. Hollywood’s “payload” contains many other ideas, such as materialism and moral relativity, that aren’t so universally loved. Stephenson is ambivalent on this.
Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.
That’s the question: It is perhaps ‘good’ that the world is becoming more homogenized and that ideas like equality and democracy are being spread into every nook and cranny. But what is it we are losing in the process? And will this loss still be considered a loss for the generation that grows up in this new world?