Alice Evans
- Drifting Future Apart -
Fareed Zakaria
Studies show that young women have become more and more liberal while young men are turning increasingly to the right. We've also seen a constant decline in the number of people getting married or living together around the world in recent decades. So, why exactly are men and women becoming so disconnected?
Alice Evans is a senior lecturer in the social science of development at King's College London.
Alice, welcome. So, let's talk about why technology now is producing this gender divide. You write a lot about how technology like smartphones has, for the first time ever, really allowed people to completely personalize their content, what they take in from the world.
Alice Evans
Absolutely, so we're no longer trapped in top-down homogenization, no longer forced to consume shows or...or share media or come to a common denominator.
Instead, each person is free to pursue whatever their preferences are, so this enables ever-greater personalization.
Moreover, once we become immersed in these echo chambers of groupthink, where everyone is preaching to the choir, reaffirming that sense of righteous resistance, we're not necessarily aware of dissent or any kind of policing. And threats of ostracism come from within that ideological tribe. So that can lead to runaway polarization.
When I was younger, entertainment technology was not that great, so my friends had nothing better to do than hang out with me. And so as young guys and girls hanging out in my garage, we were all sharing our ideas, our experiences, and there was no real difference between us, because we consumed the same content, we shared our stories, we built that community together.
But if people socialize less because humans are being outcompeted by entertainment technology, you don't necessarily hear what a man's perspective is like, so we don't build up that sense of empathy and understanding. That sense of social glue that was so inherent to your and my childhood is now weakening.
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Zakaria
And why is it that men and women seem to hang out online separately? Is that telling us something
about men and women in general?
Evans
Well, to be honest, I think we've always seen waves of this. Ever since Jane Austen was writing her romantic fiction, romantic fiction has always been written and read by women. Or move into the late 20th century, when women preferred certain shows. Technology merely enables us to realize some of our preferences. And as women might seek, you know, maybe more-environmental concerns or left-wing concerns, we're catering to those preferences. If women seek greater status and freedoms and being emboldened and feeling empowered, someone affirming their sense of importance - they readily lap it up.
Zakaria
And is it fair to say that, in general, women use smartphones more for certain kinds of things?
Evans
Certainly, men may be more likely to use games; women may be more likely to use social media. But I think the real difference is coming not so much from that but, one, if people spend more time in digital solitude, less time hanging out, then we're less likely to see men and women expressing critique and dissent or empathizing-you know, "How was your day?"; "Oh, I encountered these kinds of problems"— so you're less likely to see, sort of, people adjusting and altering and learning about the other side's perspectives, building empathy and understanding.
Zakaria
And this is happening at a time when, in any case, there is a kind of fertility crisis, right? You have the reality that, basically, ever since women have been educated and moving up, fertility has been plunging all over the world.
Evans
Absolutely, so I think that all these things are connected-that young women seem to be changing their aspirations, no longer so concerned about marriage and mother-hood, because that's competing in this dynamic trade-off where you're thinking, you know, "What's the most fun, exciting, fulfilling thing I can do? Is it being a woman in, say, a patriarchal society, where I'm expected to be subservient and obeying men and taking the lion's share of care work and adopting a more subservient role? Or could I pursue greater freedoms by staying single and not necessarily having kids?" People are in that tussle, and babies seem to be losing, which has, you know, major economic implications.
Tom Freston
- An Extraordinary Career -
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Fareed Zakaria
On August 1st, 1981, MTV was launched. The advent of the first 24-hour cable network dedicated exclusively to music videos came at a time when American culture—and American music, in particular—was one of the country's most significant soft-power exports. From Madonna to Prince to Michael Jackson, MTV broadcast the most popular American music, sometimes reaching more than 150 countries.
Today, the media landscape is shifting. Forced to contend with social media and the Internet and streaming, by the end of the year, MTV will shutter most of its global channels.
Tom Freston is a cofounder of MTV and the former CEO of Viacom. His new memoir, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, tells his extraordinary story. He joins me now.
Tom, pleasure to have you on.
Tom Freston
Pleasure to be here.
Zakaria
The music video for you begins in 1969 in San Francisco, when you're high. Tell that story.
Freston
Yes. It was my first day in California. I had been working in a bar in Aspen, and I went to California. My first night, it was Saint Patrick's Day," and a friend said, "Hey, I got tickets to go to The Fillmore, which was sort of the Garden of Psychedelic Eden at the time, and "Jefferson Airplane is coming," and "Why don't you come?" So I'm getting, like, the full-on San Francisco treatment, night one.
And there was the Joshua Light Show. It was really powerful. When you have a great song and it's coupled with, sort of, really engaging imagery, the power of a song is really multiplied. That really stayed with me and planted a seed. It was exactly 10 years later, to the day, I entered the doors of the company that would become MTV.
Zakaria
So you have that, you know, experience and that background, but then, you have another: the intervening 10 years, you're like a global itinerant, traveling all over India, Afghanistan. Why were you doing that?
Freston
I had been working in an ad agency, and I got assigned to Charmin toilet paper. It was, sort of, a line I couldn't cross.
And this former girlfriend called me from Paris and said, "Hey, you can't sell toilet paper. I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert. Why don't you quit your job and come with me?" A week later, I was on a plane. We did that. I stayed with her for about two months, and I kept going for a year.
And I ended up falling in love with Afghanistan and India. This was the tumultuous '70s. And I stayed for a year, started a business, which became very successful. And around 1979, a series of bad things began to happen, and I came back to the States, and that's when I fortuitously got a job at MTV.
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Zakaria
How did you guys decide that American music was going to be so popular around the world? Did you know it from the start?
Freston
Well, American music in film had a big cultural time. It was very culturally dominant in the '70s and the '80s, and there was a lot of reasons for that. One was English was ascendant; two, most other countries didn't have the money or ability to build independent studios or whatnot, and American companies had a lock on distribution and so forth. American culture was seen sort of as a symbol of the Free World during the Cold War years.
But then, around 2000, it began to melt away with the Internet. Local cultures got the means of production, and now, you have K-pop out of Korea; you've had Afro-pop out of Nigeria; you've got this huge wave of...of Latino music led by Bad Bunny.
So it isn't as if American music and, you know, popular culture—our soft power —has vaporized, but it has diminished, because other countries have gotten better at it themselves.
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Zakaria
You've had such an extraordinary career, but it also seems so idiosyncratic, serendipitous. If there was a young person who said, "I want to be able to have wandered the world, run a major studio, then been working with Bono on all these aid projects," what advice would you give?
Freston
I would say: "When you're really young, you can take a chance, step off the conveyor belt, and go out into the world.
You can see America and see the world from a different perspective, be in other people's shoes, and opportunities will come clearer to you. And I think when you come back, you're going to be a more desirable candidate for a lot of people in a lot of companies. If you've been in school for 16, 18 years, you don't really know what you want to do. Why not take a beat and go out and see the world? It's the best classroom you will ever find."