Yahoo.com:
Television: Is there anything it can’t do?
After decades of being slammed by bluenoses, bureaucrats, and Bruce Springsteen
for sexing up and dumbing down the masses, it turns out that the small
screen has accomplished what no amount of promise rings, Twilight
movies, or mandatory banana-on-a-condom classes have managed to do: reduce the number of teenage births.
At
least that’s what the authors of a widely discussed new study say. In
“Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV’s 16 and
Pregnant on Teen Childbearing,” (available online for the low, low price
of $5.00 from the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Melissa S. Kearney (University of Maryland) and Phillip B. Levine (Wellesley College) write “The introduction of 16 and Pregnant along with its partner shows, Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2,
led teens to noticeably reduce the rate at which they give birth.”
According to their calculations, the shows are responsible for “a 5.7
percent reduction in teen births in the 18 months following [their]
introduction.”
You’ve gotta
love economists with their ultra-precise calculations of inherently
vague social situations (who doesn’t want to be able to say with utter
confidence (PDF)
that, for example, the Budget Control Act of 2011 will result in “the
loss of 1,006,320 direct, indirect and induced jobs”?). En route to
their conclusion, Kearney and Levine concoct an inventive if not fully
compelling methodology in which they track Google searches and tweets
for terms related to teen pregnancy, contraceptives, and the like around
airings of the MTV shows.
You
can almost hear the programmers at MTV crying out like Viacom’s answer
to Oskar Schindler that they could have done so much more to prevent
just one more teen pregnancy! Indeed, who knows how many more births
they might have prevented had they not featured Farrah Abraham, who went to star in the porno Backdoor Teen Mom, which doubtless increased sexual activity among teens?
The
study is far less interesting for the specific claims it makes about
teen birth rates than it is as a variation on persistent attitudes
toward cultural production and consumption redolent of Frankfurt School anxieties
over media’s impact on the proletariat. In many ways, “Media Influences
on Social Outcomes” is simply the latest echo of the idea that TV,
music, movies, novels, and the like don’t simply move audiences to
laughter, tears, or contemplation but compel them to act in particular
ways.
The
main difference here is that rather than fretting over increases in
violent or sexual activity after watching TV, the authors claim to
document the most uplifting effect the boob tube has had since Fonzie
got his library card on Happy Days and supposedly spurred a 500 percent increase
in application requests nationwide. “Typically,” write Kearney and
Levine, “public concern addresses potential negative influences of media
exposure, but this study finds it may have positive influences as well…
We find that media has the potential to be a powerful driver of social
outcomes.” In more doctrinaire versions of Frankfurt School analysis,
the producers of content are drivers and audience members are, well,
just passengers along for the ride. To their credit, Kearney and Levine
aren’t nearly so deterministic, even though they are quick to ascribe
causative power to a particular set of programs.
In 2002’s Is Art Good for Us?, University of Tulsa professor Joli Jensen refers to this sort of thinking as an “instrumental view of culture.”
It presumes “that art is an instrument like medicine or a toxin that
can be injected into us and transform us.” This view, says Jensen, “is
very tempting because if certain kinds of culture cause bad things in
society, then you can change that culture and fix society.” The
instrumental view implies formal or informal commissars that must
oversee and direct cultural production, making sure more “good” art is
made. After all, you are what you read, or watch, or hear. Morally
suspect art leads to crime, chaos, and bad behavior.
Jensen
contrasts the instrumental view of culture with what she dubs “the
expressive view,” which proceeds from “John Dewey's understanding of
culture as a way that all of us, even those of us who are not in a
special guardian class, understand and symbolically engage the world.”
The expressive view stresses that “we all participate in creating the
meaning of a particular piece of work.”
Especially
in an age of DIY and on-demand cultural production and consumption—an
age in which even the least engaged or conscious individual is able to
decontextualize and recontextualize any piece of art in a way that would
have absolutely blown Walter Benjamin’s mind (PDF)—the
expressive view provides a more compelling and nuanced understanding of
how we engage culture. Culture isn’t something that happens to us or
programs us like robots. It’s something that emerges from the interplay
between creators and audiences.
The
expressive view of culture helps explain why despite massive increases
in depictions of violence and sex across every possible mode of
expression over the past several decades, all indicators
of problematic social behavior has declined. If popular culture really
compelled us to act one way or another, that couldn’t be true. In fact,
there is essentially no direct effect of a given show or song on us in
terms of any particular behavior. The fault (or the credit) lies not in
our TV shows but in ourselves.
This
is true even for teens, where arrests for violent crime are half of
what they were 20 years ago and where teen sexual activity continues to
drop. Despite easy access to ubiquitous and free online porn, only
around 43 percent of girls and 42 percent of boys engage in sex before
graduating high school. In 1988, the corresponding percentages were 51
percent and 60 percent. As Kearney and Levine themselves note, the teen
birth rate—around 29 girls per 1,000 between the ages of 15 and 19 give
birth—is about half of what it was two decades ago. The decline is even more pronounced if you start the trend line four or more decades back.)
In a 2012 paper titled “Explaining Recent Trends in the U.S. Teen Birth Rate (PDF),”
Kearney and Levine note that explicitly didactic interventions into
teen pregnancy issues such as “abstinence only education or mandatory
sex education” had no role in the long-term decline. Rather, they argue
that reductions in welfare benefits and access to birth control via
Medicaid account for 12 percent of the decline since 1991. More
important, “weak labor market conditions, as measured by the
unemployment rate, do appear to lead to lower teen birth rates and can
account for 28 percent of the decline in teen birth rates since the
Great Recession began.”
In
the new study, they reiterate that a rotten economy tends to drive down
birth rates: “When the labor market is weak,” they write, “teens (like
older women) respond by having fewer children. The effect is rather
large as well; a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate
reduces the teen childbearing rate by about 2 percent. This means that
the five point increase in the unemployment rate that the U.S.
experienced in the Great Recession would generate a 10 percentage point
reduction in teen childbearing.”
While
attributing a bigger share of the decline in the teen birth rate to a
crap economy rather than low-rent reality TV shows is obviously less
likely to garner New York Times coverage, it also demonstrates how the expressive understanding of culture works.
Individuals—even
the disproportionately low-income and low-educated girls who are most
likely to have babies as teens—exercise a tremendous amount of agency in
deciding when and under what circumstances they became a mother (or a
father). This decline in birth rates is in fact a global phenomenon, one
well-documented by Jonathan V. Last in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting.
In every developed economy and even most undeveloped countries, he
observes, birth rates have plummeted over the past several decades. It
turns out that when women have access to more education and better
employment possibilities, they have fewer children and have them later
in life.
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