Happy TV
By | Nov 11, 2008
This is a bit of a cut-paste-edit of an article from the Telegraph that I thought was fascinating.
The King of Bhutan - The prince who brought satellite TV to Shangri-La
It reminded me of a book I read a while back called “Remotely Controlled” by Dr Aric Sigman which explores the social, psychological, health and cultural impacts of TV - a must-read to understanding our crazy western society and its export throughout the world through the medium of television. I can’t find any review that does the brilliance of this book justice, but the closest I could find was this one.
The king of Bhutan dreamed of hauling his remote realm into the 21st century, so now it has crime and corruption and 46 channels, and a steeply declining Gross National Happiness
Bhutan had no schools, hospitals, roads, currency, electricity, police, courts, nor, until the 1960s, diplomatic relations with any other country. Yak-rearing was the main occupation, an ancient form of archery the main sport. Thus, serenely unbothered by the world beyond the kingdom’s borders, the population basked in what Professor Robert Thurman, of New York’s Columbia University, one of the few western authorities on the country, calls “a state of enduring spiritual contentment”.
With the new king’s eagerness to modernise Bhutan, things are rapidly changing, and in recent years Bhutan has embarked on a fast and furious programme of modernisation. And this is where the current problems began.
The first event to shake the kingdom out of its millennial slumber was the arrival of television. Most Bhutanis seemed perfectly content to be living in the last country on earth where the box was banned (along with Coca-Cola and high-heeled shoes), but then a round-the-clock satellite service of 46 channels – most provided by Rupert Murdoch’s racy, Asian-based Star network – was launched.
The extent of TV’s responsibility for the damaging social changes that followed is still hotly debated. Crime, vandalism and anti-social behaviour – the blight of many advanced societies, but barely known in Bhutan – started to become commonplace. Local communes, once models of rectitude and scruple, reported a sudden wave of corruption cases, while parents and teachers noticed that children were becoming alienated, contemptuous of discipline and obsessed with western pop culture. An editorial in the country’s national newspaper, Kuensel, despaired of what was happening: “We are seeing, for the first time, broken families, school dropouts, and other negative youth crimes. We are beginning to see crime associated with drug users all over the world – shoplifting, burglary and violence.”
With Bhutan’s loss of innocence came – largely at Jigme’s urging – the abandonment of the absolute monarchy, to be replaced by an elected assembly, and the embrace of the modern world. “We no longer live in a small hidden kingdom,” he declared three years ago. “We are very much a part of this new globalised world. At the end of the day, what it will always come down to is – how can Bhutan stand on her own feet? How can we make a good living? What can Bhutan sell that the world wants to buy? How can Bhutan compete with other nations as equals? We are not competing with each other, we must compete with the rest of the world. It is no longer enough to say, ‘I am the best in Bhutan’ – you have to be the best wherever you go in the world.”
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