Morality and Television

I never quite "got it" when Putnam (1996) blamed television for a lack of civic engagement in America. I couldn't quite grasp why this was such a bad thing -- what's wrong with choosing television over other people with their annoying rants, raves, problems, and insecurities?

Then it hit me: our sense of morality comes from our interactions with other people. Through actually interacting (and not in our fantasy head world of TV characters) we learn right and wrong. Of course the definitions of right and wrong will vary group to group, but the point remains. We learn from other people, and social learning theory addresses this.

TV, on the other hand, is divisive. It warmly washes over us with its representations of people and events and gives us something to look at other than other people and (horrors!) ourselves. Our senses of right and wrong become blurred in our isolation from others, or, at best, eventually adopted from the behaviors we see among television characters.

A friend of mine said that the first thing to go before an empire collapses is a common sense of morality. TV may have influenced our morality. The next thing to go is the monetary system. Locked in our homes feeding off imaginary interactions available through Netflix and the Internet, we are emotionally secure from watching the dollar collapse. The world's going to hell, and we feel great, so to speak.

I would call that a powerful media effect: when television feeds our emotions to the extent that we don't care about financial collapse around us.

Or maybe I just watch too much TV.