Television as emancipation in rural India.

It is interesting all the speculation around the increase access in technology and new media to people in rural places and how it is or is not emancipating them. Specifically, this article in Slate delves into the commonly discussed question of TV series (Indian equivalent of soaps) and their effects on women in India. According to Slate, these women are being “helped” or rather, brought into the modern times (if you will) by the cable television.

A new study by Robert Jensen of Brown University and Emily Oster of the University of Chicago shows that television is having a distinctly helpful effect on women, at least in rural India, which admittedly doesn’t have America’s half-century of experience with the medium, or 300 channels to surf through.

So I checked out the abstract from the study and it said this:

This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural India. Using a three-year individual-level panel dataset, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women’s status. We find significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference. We also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing). The effects are large, equivalent in some cases to about five years of education in the cross section, and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing differential trends. These results have important policy implications, as India and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women.

I think it can be argued that there is some truth to this. I don’t really prefer Waldfogel’s presumptive nature of the way that things are for women in rural India, as backwards and traditional and the television is helping them come into the light. However, I think some of the trends that are happening, as a result of a change in economy and the women’s movement in India, are probably reflected in television and they mutually reinforce each other.
I am weary of studies that say new technologies emancipate people in “old, narrow and backward” places. There has been similar work done on internet access and rural women in India. Women in rural India have roles and responsibilities, extensive kinship networks, methods of healing, irrigation techniques that “modernization” sometimes wipes out. I am not saying one is better than the other, it is just important to see things for what they are. Series television is very much like soap operas, they are not based in reality, the women reflect idealized and unattainable standards of beauty, and the plot lines are unrealistic and fantastical. So although they women in series may represent a more modern woman, she is also a production of capitalist desire, latching on to upper-middle class notions of success.
It is hard to judge one culture while sitting in another, wondering what exactly emancipation is for rural women in India, having some intense desire for them to be free. While ignoring how many of us are enslaved by the images we watch on television and I would hardly call that freedom.
Ultimately the study found that it was a change in attitude that is most notable, as opposed to a change in actual behavior. I think it is safe to say that TV has the potential to change attitudes everywhere, but it is a matter of the direction that we want it to change in. Mainstream media and its reach has had truly dangerous consequences for the American imagination, so, I maybe a little skeptical of calling the TV in India an “Empowerment box.”