Drake Bennett, “Guiding Lights: How Soap Operas Can Save the World”
One. What is the purpose of dishing up “Gomorrhic dysfunction” in daily soap operas?
According to global development experts, soaps shape behavior “in ways that are subtle, profound . . . and positive.”
The soaps are apparently bringing a moral community through the TV waves and providing cautionary tales: “Look what can happen to you if you engage in these types of immorality.”
Additionally, the soaps are raising important issues of the day like women’s rights, spouse abuse, infidelity, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, HIV, racism, gambling, financial responsibility, etc.
Even more startling, poor Brazilian women were emulating the rich, small families they saw on soap operas, called novelas.
The poor Brazilian women wanted to be more like DINKS, less like DKNI.
Their identification with these novelas is so strong, they name their children after the characters. The mothers see the novelas characters as members of their own family and community.
Soap operas watched in rural areas give those rural dwellers urban attitudes and lifestyle aspirations. This translates into the rural families wanting fewer children.
Soap operas also discourage women from in engaging in “louche, antisocial behavior.” Louche means disreputable and sordid.
Two. What moral contradiction does the author see in soaps as “edutainment”?
The may give moral instruction, but they also titillate with their scandalous spectacle of immoral indulgence, so that the viewers are being moralistic on one hand and salaciously voyeuristic on the other.
The author is suggesting perhaps that we should be skeptical about the long-term moral power of a venue that makes sin so tantalizing and addictive.
Neil Gabler, “The Social Networks” (355)
One. How has television become the new surrogate friendship?
Lacking social connection perhaps, viewers are hungry for television programs centered on communal connection so that TV shows take place where friends gather like coffee shops, living room, neighborhoods, school music programs, hospitals, bars—what Gabler calls the “friendship machine.”
David Brooks, commenting on this “friendship machine” discussed by Gabler, writes that young people, who marry later than ever, have a hunger for extended friendships:
But the change also reflects something deeper about the patterns of friendship in society. With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s, young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families, living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying — ripe ground for a comedy of manners.
Brooks goes on to point out that the hunger for friendship extends to parents who have too little time for friendships except for living vicariously through TV friendships:
Then, when these people do get married, friendship becomes the great challenge. Middle-aged Americans are now likely to live in two-earner families. But despite career pressures, they have not cut back on the amount of time they spend with their kids. Instead, they have sacrificed friendship time.
Brooks observes that Americans have given up one-on-one friendships, “dyadic” friendships, for “networked” friendships. These “networked” friendships are less intimate, less committed, less intense, and less mature.
Gabler writes that the surge in “friendship” TV shows is taking place at a time when Americans are more isolated, friendless, and disconnected than ever. Americans have one-third less nonfamily friends today than they did in a previous generation.
There is however “friendship lite” with the thanks of Facebook, which is championing phony friendships.
Two. Do these friendship shows comfort us?
Gabler warns that they actually remind us of our alienation and loneliness. We’re too busy working and commuting and raising families to have friends. We feel alone and we’re scared. We watch friendship shows to comfort us, but we see people living the life we only wish we could have. We don’t recognize ourselves in these “friends.” Our only consolation is to have a “nonstop fantasy” of friendship from watching Friends, Seinfeld, Community, Men of a Certain Age, Sex and the City, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Desperate Housewives, Glee, Raising Hope, Modern Family, etc.
We live vicariously through their bonhomie or cheerfulness. These shows are “pure wish fulfillment.”
Reading the Signs, numbers 3 and 4, will make good research paper topics.
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