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Lots of old fogeys, including famous social scientist Robert “Bowling Alone” Putnam, have said that TV may be ripping up our social fabric, on the grounds that time spent with Tony Soprano is time not spent with friends and neighbors. It’s hard to test this hypothesis because in the US the spread of TV coincided with other trends, like suburbanization, so the other trends might be at fault and TV an innocent bystander. But Harvard economist Benjamin Olken found a way, in Indonesia. The availability of TV in 600 villages in eastern and central Java there isn’t related to other social trends as far as he can tell, making their experience a reasonable test case.
More TV also leads to “substantially lower self-reported levels of trust” in the villages, writes Olken, but did not seem to affect the level of corruption in ongoing road projects.
