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Soapy Effects

Oct 25, 2010 Editorial

We all know that TV came late to Guyana. And when it did, it washed over us like a tsunami. While there are no surveys that monitor our viewing habits, anecdotal evidence does suggest that we have become among the most inveterate TV viewers on the planet.
That same source also suggests that “soap operas”, a staple of our booming, wild west TV industry, have seized most passionately, the attention of our female populace. A not insignificant demographic, mind you, to the advertisers that support the edifice.
In the beginning, the US soaps, dominated the genre: the schedule of “The Young and Restless” at one time pretty much determined the work and relaxation pattern of the Guyanese female. Over the last five years, soaps from India have made quite an impact on the local landscape and today they are arguably as popular as the US imports.
The secret of the success of soaps, it is widely accepted, is that they offer the viewer a voyeuristic peek into the intimate lives of characters they would be hard put to encounter in their typically hum drum lives.
That the peek invariably reveals scarcely believable plot-lines is never a deterrent – in fact it perks the interest of “what might have been” in their own lives. Soap operas, after all, are entertainment at its least believable and least nutritious.
The possibility, therefore, that people might be modelling themselves after characters on soaps might seem both farfetched and frightening. A spate of recent research, however, suggests that, all over the world, that’s exactly what’s happening. Soaps, it turns out, are shaping behaviour in ways that are subtle, profound and, from the standpoint of some global development experts, positive.
A team of economists credits Brazilian TV “novelas” for helping to dramatically lower a fertility rate that in 1960 was above six births per woman. Others have found that in India — where soaps dominate the airwaves — villages where people watch more TV give more responsibilities and rights to women and girls.
Researchers in Rwanda have found that radio soap operas there can help defuse the country’s dangerous ethnic tensions. Turkish soap operas have set off a public debate about women’s roles in the Middle East.
And research in the United States has found that health tips tucked into soaps have greater sticking power than with just about any other mode of transmission. In a surprising number of ways, soap operas are improving lives around the world.
Two economists, Emily Oster at the University of Chicago and Robert Jensen at UCLA, looked at surveys on a range of social attitudes in five Indian states from 2001 to 2003, a time of rapid expansion in access to cable TV.
As with Brazil’s Eliana La Ferrara, Oster and Jensen found that the spread of cable to rural India brought down the fertility rate, but they found other changes as well: Women with cable access were less approving of the idea that a husband could justifiably beat his wife, and reported having more autonomy and more of a role in household financial matters. Their daughters were more likely to be enrolled in school.
However, Oster and La Ferrara both readily concede that their work only measures a tiny sliver of the potential changes in attitudes and behaviour that soap opera viewers might exhibit — and that not all of those other changes might be healthy ones.
Soap operas and novelas are full of all sorts of louche, anti-social behaviour, even on the part of the heroes: a dangerous susceptibility to erotic impulses, a predilection for vigilante justice, an openness to being fooled, at least initially, by villainous suitors and step-parents. There’s no research to determine whether viewers are in some small way absorbing these tendencies, as well.
It’s no surprise that the behavioural impact of soap operas can be ambiguous. But maybe with the aid of media scholars and psychologists, we can look at ways to focus the power of soaps, using them to deliver more specific, positive messages.

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