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Issues concerning culture and personality are addressed
everyday in the popular media--from a call for "Family
Values" to concern for the conflicting cultural value of
"free speech" protection for pornography to censorship of TV
programs that are "too violent" for children. On the one
hand, we promote "safe sex," but seldom in TV movies or
soaps are actors seen portraying protective behavior or
asking hard questions or saying no. Spontaneous sex sells
programming and makes it "sexy," removing the public service
announcements on safe sex from the notion of romance or
sequential responsible behavior.
48. WHAT MTV HATH WROUGHT
(1981-Present)
There were extravagant predictions made about how
MTV-short for Music Television-would change the music
industry when it debuted in 1981. It was said by some that
by putting the emphasis on visuals, rather than on sound,
MTV would change the type of rock artists who would succeed.
Others noted that MTV would diminish the importance of live
performances, help take political rebellion out of the
music, and blur the distinction between programming and
commercials-since rock videos were little more than
sophisticated advertisements for the record companies and
artists producing them. And it was all true.
By the end of the eighties, in fact, many assumed that
MTV had been "the most influential single cultural product
of the (past) decade," as one writer put it-the source of
everything from that decade's ironic style to the rise of
television programming geared not to the masses but to a
specific demographic group (sometimes called
"narrowcasting"). Less than two years later, Newsweek was
saying that "MTV has changed the way we talk, dress, dance,
make and consume music, and how we process information."
Billboard went further: "(N)o other single force on
television has had such a strong and startling impact on our
culture since the advent of TV itself." If anything, the
accolades have multiplied in the years since. Today, MTV has
become virtually synonymous with American culture.
In retrospect, it's no surprise that MTV proved a force
in the recording and musical industries dominated by young
consumers, as its continuous televising of short music
videos drew a small but steady audience. Nor is there any
issue about MTV's innovativeness or profitability, given its
low overhead.
Instead, the question is why this small cable network
changed a mass medium like television at all, which, in
turn, enabled it to influence the whole culture. After all,
MTV's videos-often infused with a surrealistic style that
recalled experimental movies-have never been popular with
the vast majority of people who watch TV. A 1991 survey
found that, in a typical moment, MTV was watched by less
than one home out of 160 with cable, and one in 300 overall.
By contrast, the major networks routinely post ratings some
50 times better than MTV which tends to attract only about
350,000 households at any one time. At best, MTV is an
acquired taste even for most of its young target audience,
who watch for an average of 18 minutes at a time. Yet taste
it we all have, whether we like it or not, and most of us
fuddy-duddies do not.
To be fair: MTV was never designed to reach the masses.
"The plan to create a hipness for MTV was to position it as
the very opposite of the three networks-a sort of
'stick-it-in-your-eye' approach," former MTV president Bob
Pittman once wrote. Meticulously organized from demographic
research in the early days of cable in 1980 and 1981, the
network was designed to appeal to the notoriously
hard-to-reach 18-to-29-year-old age group-sought after by
advertisers because it has so much discretionary income, but
ignored by the major networks because this group's preferred
programming doesn't tend to appeal to the masses.
To reach these young viewers, a group of young executives
decided to develop a channel merging rock and television by
telecasting continuous music videos-a form that had been
kicking around for some 40 years and shown sporadically in
rock and dance clubs. Though some videos cost millions to
make and were in every way striking, many were surprisingly
amateurish-almost like five-minute home movies. Sometimes
they had some narrative roughly parallel to the song, but
more often they consisted merely of the band (or singer)
clowning in front of the camera while a wave of
scantily-clad women or surrealistic images unconnected to
the music danced by.
Equally important to MTV's success, founder Bob Pittman
decided he had to build not only a channel but a
sensibility. With that in mind, the network tried to create
an "environment"-a "channel with no programs, no beginning,
no middle, no end." We understood that music videos were
program elements, not complete programs by themselves,"
Pittman once wrote. "MTV was the program." A similar
approach would come to distinguish other cable networks
owned by the parent company-sister VH-1, which played videos
for older viewers, and Nickelodeon, which replayed old TV
series for baby boomers in prime time, and original
programming for their kids during the day. "In every case,"
one MTV chairman said, "we try to make the audience
associate with the network first, the shows second." To the
extent that this notion succeeded, it would be said that the
first generation of TV viewers watched individual programs,
while the second generation watched networks or just
television.
MTV debuted on August 1, 1981, with the voice-over
announcement "Ladies and gentlemen-rock and roll!" followed
by a prophetic video by the Buggles, "Video Killed the Radio
Star." Within just three years the network was profitable-
the good fortune helped considerably by record companies
which supplied the videos for free because of the way they
boosted sales. Thanks, in part, to the Dire Straits song
"Money for Nothing," the saying "I want my MTV" became an
international battle cry. By 1984, MTV had become the
highest-rated basic cable network, with a 1.1 rating-though
this was still in the early days of cable, when only about
one in five homes was wired for the service. And that
translated into little more than 160,000 homes at any one
time.
As critic John Leland once wrote, perhaps MTV offered the
first type of TV programming that hadn't been adapted from
radio, the stage, or the movies-though playing a series of
songs every hour was a format straight out of the radio
playbook. Yet, within months, MTV was rescuing a moribund
recording industry, even while rearranging the elements that
had traditionally led to pop stardom. In the new universe of
visual sensation, such rock acts as Duran Duran and Madonna
flourished-as did others who were photogenic or produced
flashy themes that could be illustrated easily. Meanwhile,
critics charged that MTV both regularly shortchanged black
artists and often displayed videos notorious for their
violence and misogyny.
By 1983, MTV was already influencing movie-making: Much
of the popular Flashdance was little more than a dance video
at greater length. Still, even though MTV had an immediate
effect on both rock and movies, its influence on television
programming was subtler. Those initially drawn to its style
were advertisers-no surprise, perhaps, since MTV was a
network devoted solely to running a form of 24-hour-a-day
commercials. Washington Post critic Tom Shales was not alone
in noticing how, as a purely commercial network, the MTV
zeitgeist celebrated "conspicuous consumption nonstop."
"Words and phrases like 'commercialize,' 'selling out' and
'the establishment' seem irrelevant in the context of an MTV
culture," he wrote in 1985.
The videos' use of rock music, quick cuts, hand-held
cameras, art-film techniques, and outrageous visuals also
appealed to advertisers. By harnessing the rock culture
visually, these techniques gave products a youthful patina
and sensibility-equally sought-after attributes in a culture
that worships adolescence. If advertising could become
indistinguishable from programming (as it often did on MTV),
it could also help eliminate the new problem of
"zapping"-viewer manipulation of remote-control devices
which allowed those viewers to switch away from commercials
and over to other networks.
The style of MTV also elevated feeling and sensation over
thought-one reason why rock critic Greil Marcus would label
the process "semiotic pomography." "The art of montage has
changed both the way we look at things and the way we hear
things," MTV host Kurt Loder once told a reporter. "You can
deliver pure sensation and dispense with narrative." In that
world of "pure sensation," advertisers wield
more-than-average persuasive power, since if consumers
actually think about whether they need another product, the
game is lost. It recalls what Pittman once told a writer
about his channel. "The strongest appeal you make is
emotional," he said. "MTV fits in with all of this because
music deals with mood, not continuity or plot."
By 1984, political observers were already noting how
commercials for Ronald Reagan's reelection were "short on
story and substantive message and long on quick bursts of
sight and sound stimulation." "They don't call on the
viewers to think deeply, just to rock along with their
images," wrote Ferrel Guillory. That sensibility, political
scientist Benjamin Barber would later argue, is "not good
for the kind of deliberative consensus-building and the
arbitration of differences that democracy is about." To
which a popular video of the time might reply, "Beat
It."
In commercial television, ads are often the tail that
wags the programming dog, if only so those ads won't clash
with the shows. So the MTV style came to network television
too, whether the masses liked it or not. In the same autumn
that those Reagan ads appeared, a new show premiered on NBC:
Miami Vice. Described as "MTV Cops" before the show actually
had a name, Miami Vice took the traditional police show and
fumed it into a kind of weekly hour-long rock video replete
with musical sound track, jagged narrative, emphasis on
stylized violence, and sharp visuals. "No earth tones," said
creator Michael Mann, when asked what made his show
distinctive. Leads Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas
even exchanged the old police uniform for expensive Italian
designer outfits: unstructured jackets worn over T-shirts
and pleated pants. "(W)here did they get the clothes-and the
boat and the Ferrari-on cop pay?" asked the literal critic
John Leonard. Within months the style was being imitated on
everything from other cop shows like Hollywood Beat to a new
CBS news show, West 57th, which tried to merge the
sensibilities of 60 Minutes and Miami Vice in a hip news
show for younger viewers that one network wag labeled "yup
to the minute."
As ads had followed MTV in becoming more experimental,
visually appealing, and accelerated, so too did TV
programming. Shows like Moonlighting tried out (and wore
out) rapid-fire dialogue impossible to catch on a first
viewing, and also shot several segments in black and white.
From Peewee's Playhouse, a kids' show that used special
effects, to Late Night With David Letterman and its camera
tricks, television now seemed infused with the MTV
sensibility. Longer shows with one continuous plot seemed to
lose popularity too, in favor of dramas like L.A. Law-which
stayed with one plot for only a few minutes before switching
to another. (Compare L.A. Law to its predecessor, the
detail-oriented Perry Mason.) Even a show like
thirtysomething exhibited the trend to diminution of plot
(try to describe in more than one sentence what happened on
any single episode), relying instead on flashbacks and
character development to create a feeling.
By increasing the viewer's craving for visual
stimulation, MTV was also part of a process which helped
create tabloid television. Hard Copy and Inside Edition-with
their emphases on emotion, celebrities, and blood-and-guts
reporting-were the logical culmination of an MTV-inspired
approach to news. MTV also helped blur the line between
programming and advertising, which led eventually to the
popularity of the Home Shopping Network and "infomercials,"
if not to a much stronger ethic of consumption across the
nation.
Because this was an age in which image would become as
important as song in marketing records, MTV's emergence
would also mark the triumph of simulation over reality,
though that transformation had been inevitable ever since
television hit the scene-as any student of the quiz scandals
or the rise of the Monkees knows. It is no coincidence that
our first MTV-era president, Ronald Reagan, was fond of
telling audiences stories of how he had helped liberate
concentration camps at the end of World War II, when his
only experience with a Dachau or Treblinka was sitting in a
darkened room watching movies of those events. "You believed
in it because you wanted to believe it," Reagan once told a
reporter who thought he had seen Reagan on the set of a
movie which didn't feature him at all. "There's nothing
wrong with that. I do it all the time."
Yet the problem would eventually go well beyond the
entertainment industry and Reagan himself. Take the matter
of "ghosting." Everyone now casually accepts the fact that
most politicians and business leaders don't write their
speeches, many judges don't write their opinions, and many
professors have students write their research tomes. Half
the books on the best-seller nonfiction list are
ghost-written. Yet few people ask: Are these works real? If
her "music" cannot be reproduced on stage, who is Madonna?
If his lines are mostly written by joke writers, who is
Letterman? Was Ronald Reagan president, or only playing the
role? In an environment in which no one knows what to
believe, anything is believable, just as long as you believe
strongly enough.
The irony, of course, is that the MTV style was never
particularly popular: This was one change in the teleculture
that was not democratic. Most of the shows that aped
MTV-Miami Vice, West 57th, and even Letterman's-were far
more popular with the avant-garde critics in New York than
they were with the masses. By the early 1990s, the real
story at MTV was how the network was becoming more like the
rest of television, not the other way around. The parade of
videos had become, in one critic's words, "the most
electrifying bore on television."
In fact, by the nineties even the seamless, programless
format had been scrapped on MTV to make way for news
broadcasts with Tabitha Soren, shopping shows, Beavis and
Butt-Head, game shows, and soap operas. By 1995, two-thirds
of MTV's prime-time programming no longer even directly
concerned music, and its highest-rated shows were Road
Rules, a soap, and Singled Out, a dating show. What's more,
the hour-long drama show, declared dead five years earlier
by all the critics who said audiences would no longer sit
still because of the changes MTV had inspired, suddenly
underwent a renaissance, as shows such as ER and NYPD Blue
soared in the ratings. TV is tougher to change than it looks
to be.
Nevertheless, as cable television grew in influence, and
channel grazing became a way of life, the quick cuts and
other attributes of the MTV style remained-if not as much in
programming, then in the hands of viewers themselves. "What
is cable TV for," New York Times columnist Russell Baker had
once asked, "if you don't keep changing the channels?" The
remote-control device had existed since 1955, but before
there were all these choices in cable America, it didn't
have a true function. As a scholar would point out, channel
surfing in the nineties became "a way of making up your own
mosaic of images"-a kind of nightly, self-made MTV video.
"In America" Huey Long had once said, "every man a king."
Now, in the post-MTV era, it's every man an auteur.
Another aspect of culture and personality is determining
what parts of individual or societal behavior is a
reflection of one's culture or hard wired in our brain's
structure or chemistry. We have examined the debate between
male and female behavior differences in past sessions. Let's
examine another that appeared in the Fort Myers News Press,
Friday March 13, 1998 on page A1.
Women better at finding things; men better at thinking
they can
The Associated Press
Gainesville--Men think they can do it, and women do it.
Men are convinced they can find things around the house,
but a new study by researchers at the University of Florida
concluded that women actually are better at finding
them.
In the study of gender differences in memory, men were
more confident than women that they could remember where
they put their car keys, pill bottles and other personal
items.
But women showed greater competence in finding the
objects, said psychology professor Robin West, who designed
the research project with graduate student Duana Welch.
They studied 300 people in the Gainesville area between
the ages of 18 and 30, and 50 and 90, but they think the
findings apply to all ages.
"To say that when it comes to memory, women have more
skill than confidence and men have more confidence than
skill is a simplistic way to put it, but we found it to be
true," said West, author of the book "Memory Fitness Over
Forty."
Men may show more confidence because they are socialized
to form strong self-convictions, Welch said. Women may be
less confident because they are brought up to be supportive
and nonthreatening.
Women may outperform men in the search because they have
more experience in finding things around the house, she
said.
You will be asked to pick apart this study in your
questions to answer.
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