Fed by success stories of advertising campaigns and occasional stories of individuals acting out bizarre incidents seen on television or in movies, a large part of the community believe that television and videos major effect on social behaviour is a direct one, whereby programme material is either directly imitated or directly
undermines social morality.
But despite the real gains in
social morality that came in the wake of the abolition of the slave trade, despite the rise in the status of women, despite the benefits that came from the enactment of child - labor laws and the establishment of the welfare state, did not the nineteenth century also bequeath to us those proposed «solutions» to
social ills that led to mass starvation in Russia and China, to the utopian nightmares of communism and fascism, to wars unending, and ¯ in those societies that actually managed to abolish most
social evils ¯ to a hedonism that is
undermining society from within?