How Television Has Changed the World
LAST summer, TV turned the world into a global sports arena. In Rome, Italy, the streets were deserted. Some 25 million Italians were watching the World Cup soccer matches. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, the streets were likewise desolate, and for the same reason. In Cameroon, West Africa, the same grayish-blue light flickered eerily in the windows as millions cheered in unison. In war-torn Lebanon, soldiers propped televisions up on their idle tanks to watch. By the time the tournament reached its climax, an estimated one fifth of the earth’s population was watching, drawn to the box like moths to flames, their faces lit by its pale glow.
This mammoth TV event was not unique. In 1985 nearly a third of the earth’s population—about 1,600,000,000 people—watched the rock concert called Live Aid. A dozen satellites beamed the program to some 150 countries, ranging from Iceland to Ghana.
TV—this ubiquitous box has been at the heart of a subtle revolution. The technology grew from the tiny, flickering screens of the 1920’s and 1930’s to the sophisticated screens of today, with vivid color and crispness, meanwhile fueling a global boom. In 1950 there were fewer than five million television sets in the world. Today, there are about 750,000,000.
Events such as the World Cup soccer matches only illustrate the power of TV to unite the globe in a single information network. TV has changed the way people learn of the world around them. It has helped to spread news and ideas, even culture and values, from one land to another, effortlessly flowing over the political and geographic boundaries that once stemmed such tides. TV has changed the world. Some say it can change you.
Johannes Gutenberg is widely held to have revolutionized mass communications when the first Bible came off his printing press in 1455. Now a single message could suddenly reach a vastly greater audience in a shorter span of time, at a greatly reduced cost. Governments soon saw the power of the press and tried to control it with licensing laws. But the printed media reached ever greater audiences. In the early 1800’s, historian Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that newspapers had the extraordinary power to plant the same idea in 10,000 minds in a single day.
Now consider television. It can plant the same idea in hundreds of millions of minds—all in the same instant! And unlike the printed page, it does not require its viewers to be educated in the complex art of reading, nor does it ask them to form their own mental images and impressions. It delivers its messages with pictures and sound and all the enticements they can produce.
It did not take long for politicians to see the tremendous potential of television. In the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower used TV shrewdly in his 1952 presidential campaign. According to the book Tube of Plenty—The Evolution of American Television, Eisenhower won the election because he proved the more “merchandisable” candidate in the media. The book shows that TV may have played an even greater role in John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 election. When the candidates debated on TV, Kennedy scored higher with viewers than Nixon did. Yet, audiences who heard the same debate over the radio felt that it had been a draw. Why the difference? Nixon looked pale and haggard, while Kennedy was robust and tanned, exuding confidence and vitality. After the election, Kennedy said of television: “We wouldn’t have had a prayer without that gadget.”
“That gadget” continued to make its power felt worldwide. Some began calling it the third superpower. Satellite technology enabled broadcasters to beam their signals across national borders and even oceans. World leaders used TV as a forum to garner international support and denounce their rivals. Some governments used it to transmit propaganda into enemy countries. And just as governments had tried to control Gutenberg’s invention once they understood its power, many governments took tight hold of television. In 1986 nearly half of all nations were broadcasting only government-controlled programs.
Technology, however, has made TV harder and harder to control. Today’s satellites transmit signals that can be picked up even at homes having relatively small dish antennas to receive the broadcast. Small, portable video cameras and videocassettes, coupled with a profusion of amateur photographers, have produced an often unstoppable flood of visual records of almost any newsworthy event.
One U.S. news organization, Turner Broadcasting’s CNN (Cable News Network), gathers news reports from some 80 countries and relays them all over the world. Its global, round-the-clock coverage can turn any event into an international issue almost instantaneously.
Increasingly, television has changed from a recorder of world events to a shaper of world events. TV played a key role in the string of revolutions that rocked Eastern Europe in 1989. Crowds in Prague, Czechoslovakia, chanted in the streets, demanding “live transmission” on TV. And whereas revolutionaries once shed blood to secure some government building, fortress, or police stronghold, the revolutionaries of 1989 struggled first of all to gain access to television stations. In fact, Romania’s new regime started to govern the country from the television station! So, calling TV the third superpower may not be farfetched at all.
But TV has done more than influence the political arena. It is even now changing the world’s culture and values. The United States is often accused of ‘cultural imperialism,’ that is, of foisting its culture on the world through the medium of television. Since the United States was the first country to build up a stockpile of profitable commercial programs, in the late 1940’s and in the 1950’s, American producers were able to sell programs to other nations at a fraction of what it would cost them to produce their own shows.
In the late 1980’s, Kenya was importing up to 60 percent of its TV shows; Australia, 46 percent; Ecuador, 70 percent; and Spain, 35 percent. Most of these imports came from the United States. One American show, Little House on the Prairie, was broadcast in 110 countries. The show Dallas appeared in 96 lands. Some complained that local flavor was vanishing from television around the world, that American consumerism and materialism were spreading.
Many nations are in an uproar over ‘cultural imperialism.’ In Nigeria, broadcasters have complained that the infusion of foreign shows erodes the national culture; they worry that Nigerian viewers seem more informed about the United States and Britain than about Nigeria. Europeans feel similarly. At a recent U.S. congressional hearing, broadcasting tycoon Robert Maxwell fumed: “No nation should tolerate its culture being subjugated by a foreign one.” Consequently, some nations have begun to impose limits on the number of nondomestic programs that stations may broadcast.
‘Cultural imperialism’ may damage more than cultures. It may even hurt the planet. The have-it-all-now consumerism of Western society has played a part in the fouling of the air, the poisoning of the water, the general ravaging of the earth. As a writer for The Independent, a London newspaper, put it: “Television has brought to the world a glittering prospect of material liberation—of Western prosperity—that is delusive, for it can be achieved only at the cost of damaging the natural environment beyond repair.”
Clearly, television is changing the world today, and not always for the better. But it also has much more specific effects on individuals. Are you vulnerable?
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Newspapers can put an idea in ten thousand minds in one day
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Television can put an idea in hundreds of millions of minds instantaneously