If you watch Netflix, you can’t complain about the rise of populism
70 years ago, a short novel was published in England titled “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece about a world controlled by an omnipresent government monitoring the inhabitants and controlling their very thoughts and perceptions of reality is often cited as a template for today’s political developments in the Western world. In particular the behaviour of the current US President and his helpers in the White House and in Congress draw frequent comparisons to the novel.
But I think the parallels between Donald Trump and the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four are superficial and cannot explain how populism has risen across the entire Western world. Of course, there are many triggers for the rise of populism, from the fear of immigrants that fuels the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Lega in Italy to the call for national sovereignty that drives the Brexit Party in the UK to the rising income inequality that powers populist parties on the left. Triggers for the rise of populism are manifold but a seed can only grow into a full-fletched political movement if it falls on fertile ground.
Unfortunately, we are too often pre-occupied with fighting the triggers of the current wave of populism and don’t think enough about the foundations that made this rise in populism possible in the first place. Just like there are many triggers for the rise of populism there are many developments that made this rise possible in the first place.
Recently, I grabbed Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” from my bookshelf. This book has influenced me a lot and I still think that everyone should read it (so if you have never read it, do it). In it, Neil Postman describes how the rise of the entertainment industry leads to a decline in rational discourse and civic engagement. Instead of the surveillance state of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he draws parallels to the “Brave New World” of Aldous Huxley where citizens are left in a state of bliss thanks to the universally supplied drug “soma”. Postman writes his book in 1987 and thus compares the prevalence of TV and especially the entertainment shows of cable TV to soma, but in the 21stcentury it has become clear that it is not just TV, but the internet and especially social media that keeps us entertained 24/7.
Of course, neither TV nor the internet are negative developments per se. Instead it is how we use them that can lead to either positive or negative effects. But the anecdotal evidence that everyone of us can collect by just reflecting on their own media usage shows us that we don’t usually use the internet to consume information and educational content. My smartphone has a function that shows me how much time I spent with which application each day, making it amply clear to me that I am guilty as charged. Over the last week, I have picked up my smartphone on average 45 times per day and spent close to five hours per day using it. About one third of the time I used social media and played games and trust me, my internet browsing history isn’t just news and Wikipedia, either.
Postman claims that entertainment (be it on TV or on the internet) effectively crowds out more useful content consumption because, well, it is more entertaining and less demanding to consume. This, in turn, has several effects. First, children and teenagers who watch a lot of TV or spend a lot of time online may experience slower cognitive development. The brain needs to be trained, especially at a young age when plasticity is still high, and consuming mindless entertainment effectively leads to a lack of cognitive development. Second, older people should continue to keep their brains fit, but increased consumption of entertainment may accelerate mental decline. Third, whenever someone sits in front of a TV and watches Netflix (or some other entertainment program), this person does not spend time in his community or with family and friends. This social disengagement leads to civic disengagement and eventually to political apathy that creates the fertile ground on which the seeds of simple populist political messages can grow.
Back in 1987 when Neil Postman wrote his book he did not have any empirical evidence for his claims so it was easy to dismiss his claims as fearmongering. Fortunately, in the year 2019, we now have empirical evidence that Postman was right. A new study by Ruben Durante and his colleagues investigated the spread of entertainment TV in Italy in the 1980s and its effect on the political landscape in that country ten years later. In the mid-1980s, Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset spread across the country and overtook the public broadcaster RAI as the most popular broadcaster. The channels of Mediaset showed more entertainment and less news and informational content than RAI and when it came to movies and TV shows, the ones shown on RAI tended to be of higher critical acclaim and increased sophistication than the ones shown on Berlusconi’s channels. The authors of the study show that this increased consumption of entertainment media led to a decline of cognitive abilities in those viewers that watched the most TV (i.e. TV literally made them dumber). Furthermore, civic engagement declined more in those regions where Berlusconi’s TV channels were introduced earlier and consumed more frequently.
And the effect of all that? When Berlusconi ran for Prime Minister with his centre-right populist party Forza Italia ten years later in 1994, his party got a boost in those regions that had historically higher consumption of entertainment TV. In their study, Durante and his colleagues show that the boost for the populist party of Berlusconi at the expense of the traditional parties in Italy was not only due to the fact that Berlusconi could run party propaganda via his own TV channels or that Berlusconi simply had better name recognition than other candidates. They make a convincing case that the driver of the boost for the populist parties was due to the decline in cognitive abilities and civic engagement. In fact, after Berlusconi was forced to disappear from the political arena, it was the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) that got a similar boost in electoral votes than Forza Italia under Berlusconi. And this boost in electoral votes is not small. In 1994, when Berlsuconi ran for office for the first time, the researchers estimate that Forza Italia’s vote share was boosted by 8.5 percentage points in those regions that were early users of entertainment TV. In 2013, the boost for Forza Italia was still 2 percentage points while the populists of M5S got an estimated electoral boost of 5.2 percentage points.
Twenty years after Berlusconi ran for office for the first time and thirty years after the spread of entertainment-heavy cable TV programs in Italy the influence of entertainment consumption on the political landscape of the country was still large. A seven to eight percentage point boost in the electoral votes can easily swing an election towards the populist parties. Be it in the US or across Europe, electoral majorities today are typically in the range of a few percentage points. Thus, the power grab of the populist parties and politicians would likely be impossible had we not started in the 1980s to “amuse ourselves to death”.
As I mentioned above, I am guilty as charged when it comes to consuming entertainment on the internet and on TV, though when I read Postman’s book more than a decade ago, I took gradual action to consume less entertainment and more “healthy” media content. Today, I no longer own a TV. Don’t worry, thanks to streaming services, I still watch more TV than I want to, but at least the hurdle to watching entertainment programs has increased and as a result, my media consumption today is far healthier than when I still had a TV. Similarly, I have blocked certain websites on my internet browser in order to reduce the temptation of wasting time on these sites. And finally, I have very limited consumption of social media. I have no Facebook profile and only use Twitter and LinkedIn as social media platforms. All of these measures have helped me create a healthier media diet and, you would not believe it, provides me with more time to engage with friends, family and the people in my community or simply read a good book. I highly recommend it to everyone. It dramatically improves your quality of life and, it seems, is also good for the country.