TV Global Influencing - Part 2

Another unobvious application of TV was promoted by health and family welfare minister of India. He suggested assisting TV expansion to decrease birthrates. From his point of view, a television is considered as the substitution for sex that used to be the only entertainment in the past.

In 1970s, Brazilian soap operas used the popular female characters that were uncommon to this country: divorced, having no kids ones. And soon it started to transform to the realty. More and more women preferred to get higher education and tended to have fewer children. Against the contraceptive advertising restrictions and without any government policies the soap operas managed to choose social attitudes.
In a similar way, soap operas affected on women in rural India. Popular characters from TV shows, that have high education, run business and have few children, inspired Indian village girls to stay at school longer and become well-educated.

Thus, cable and satellite changed the birthrates and girls’ high school enrollment, increased female autonomy and significantly decreased the difference between the life in cities and in countries. The director of Afganistan Star claims that this show “do more for women’s rights than all the millions of dollars we have spent on public service announcements for women’s rights on TV.”

In addition, TV shows lead to decreasing drug consumption by young people, as survey of World Bank reports. And not only soap operas work miracles but also purposeful educational broadcast campaigns affect people and make social changes. For example, in Ghana the amount of women, who wash their hands before cooking, increased after the broadcast campaign explaining the potential damage of dirty hands.
In spite of common opinion that a television impedes learning, well-designed educational TV programs can even improve the results of school tests. Nowadays in Mexico the Telesecundaria program helps about 700,000 schoolchildren to get better scores in mathematics and language.

The influence of a television on the human society can be ambiguous. According Ben Olken, habitants of Javanese rural areas decreased the level of participation in social activities. But it didn’t affect the participation in discussions and meetings. The similar results were achieved in the researches of US regions that got access to more channels in 1950s. It increased political knowledge and interest among the local population.