In the 1996 movie The Cable Guy, Jim Carrey acts out a story of a character raised by TV and eventually became known as the “Cable Guy”. The Cable Guy has no real names in the film, only referring to himself with names from famous movies, and was only able to socialize with the world by replicating personalities on the shows he used to watch when growing up; not because he loved watching TV so much, but because of the parental neglect that he suffered throughout his childhood had led him to consume nothing but television. The Cable Guy is a depiction of real-life tragedies of the television boom, sugarcoated in exaggerated comedy.
The “golden age of television” started in the 1940s and had taken hold in most households by the 2000s. By the turn of the century, television shows have evolved into an eclectic assortment of fantastic escapes that have captured a piece of almost every viewer’s heart; at the same time, media corporations have gradually mastered the development of TV programs that draw viewers’ attention. Television slowly assumed roles of subconscious influence on society — our childhoods were shaped by the Saturday morning cartoons that we used to watch; our personalities sometimes imitate a character with whom we identify in a show that we are following — a subconscious behavior called identification; finally, have you noticed how hard it is sometimes to find a common topic with someone who doesn’t have the same taste in movies as you?
The popularity of television programming had some societal side effects. The often profit-driven nature of many television companies have led them to discover that the key to higher view ratings is to exploit human empathy, thus they prefer the development of shows that elicit the strongest emotional response in the audience. More often than not, these highly stimulating emotional responses are not healthy for the mental development of a child, whose key trigger of learning is also directly correlated to the strength of the emotion elicited during the event. A child with high amounts of TV time and low amount of substantive experiential learning from real-life social interactions may remember behavior lessons taught by TV shows more deeply than what they experience in real life just because they felt more when witnessing the gripping plots on television. As a result, they may start to imitate the larger-than-life personalities they see on TV instead of developing their own individual personalities. Without proper parental guidance, children can start to internalize what they watch on TV and model their real-world beliefs around exaggerated television shows. Such distorted views on society can at best numb a child’s emotional response to real-world events, or at worst develop extreme personalities that can destabilize society, as The Cable Guy has ludicrously depicted. The old saying goes, “you are what you eat,” but maybe its scope should be expanded — “you are what you consume.”
It was not hard for institutions to start realizing the power of social influence vested in mass television consumption. Many nations started using television media as a tool to shape mass opinion. Police TV dramas are produced to glorify police forces beyond reality to undermine the fact that law enforcement agencies are not always morally aligned; the recent wake of surveillance technology had prompted South Korea to produce Korean drama that portrayed surveillance technology as an omniscient enforcer of justice (the South Korean series Sweet Revenge 복수노트 was so widely popular that a second season was produced — a rarity in Korean drama shows). The effects of such social influence aren’t always deleterious, however, as South Korea touted significant success in containing the COVID-19 outbreak, partly due to its citizens’ developed trust that surveillance technology can actually do good in the right hands, and it has indeed. Over the years, television has generally become a propaganda tool to manipulate public opinion and align their view points to the local regimes, for better or for worse.
An even earlier invention of media was music and the radio. Unlike television shows, music and radio have much lower barriers to entry; a TV series can cost millions to produce but a song usually takes a month of a starving musician’s time. As a result, music and radio (and podcasts later on) have developed to have a more natural resonance with the common people; they often reflect a musician and listener’s inner personalities and amplifies them. That isn’t to say the least that audio media has not influenced society, but its influence was more grass-root and bottom-up. Music and radio was often the representation of common people’s ideas reflected onto more people, forming various central pop cultures. It was a tool for the masses. For example, music was a way for the oppressed to convey messages to each other (e.g. Wade_in_the_Water); and music was a way to express disdain for government actions during the hippie movement. In the beginning, music, radio, and podcasts mainly became the media of the people, while television programming became under the influence of central governments and those with enough wealth to pay a whole production crew.
The internet boom, however, pulled that ladder of influence of visual media away from central institutions. The advent of YouTube and other media hosting platforms gradually lowered the barrier of entry into content creation and broadcasting, and as a result fostered an eclectic mix of online media personalities that had more individualistic opinions than traditional TV stars. The grip of media culture is now more in the hands of the people and the tech corporations that host the media. Furthermore, giants like Netflix and Amazon have recently obtained even more control in visual media consumption as people now prefer watching shows online than on TV. As a result, these tech giants now have the power to shape public opinion by catering to them the shows they would prefer them to watch simply by tweaking the recommendation algorithm; this is a power more formidable than all previous generations of visual media.
Media is a powerful tool, it has the ability to calm the masses or destabilize nations. In the hands of the wrong people, media can become a tool that implants seeds of ideology into the viewers
Each technological evolution has brought on new forms of media
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