What does junk TV say about social capital?

Today Good Morning America aired a message left on a high school student’s phone by the wife of the local school administrator. The student had called the administrator’s home to complain that school hadn’t been cancelled due to snow, and the wife—infuriated by the student’s gall—gave him a dressing-down via voicemail. The student subsequently posted the voicemail on the internet, and the thorough folks over at ABC trawling the web for anything remotely scandalous featured it on national television.

What does it say about the state of social capital when a private citizen can end up on a major television show for momentarily losing her cool? Whether you think that this woman acted inappropriately or that the student got what he deserved, there is clearly no news angle whatsoever. It’s just another piece of entertainment intended to grab viewers’ attention in a fiercely competitive media environment. But it means that anyone, anywhere, could suddenly be held up to public scrutiny, even without doing something truly shocking.

On one hand, this increased “transparency,” if you will, can be good for society. One of the explanations for higher crime rates in urban compared to rural areas is surely the denser social web in small towns. Word of criminal behavior can get around and shame entire families as well as guilty individuals, while the anonymity of urban life provides a cloak for anti-social behavior. The existence of the Internet (to exaggerate) means that there is in a sense a security camera on all our behavior, playing a similar role to the Big Brother-ish aspects of small towns. Any words or deeds can be captured and displayed for the world to see (if the world ever finds the page).

Yet there is something deeply disturbing about the ongoing erosion in privacy (being realized far more quickly, incidentally, by people’s voluntary sharing of information through blogs, Facebook, etc., than by the insidious Patriot Act). There are a variety of reasons that it offends and frightens, but one of them comes back to the idea of social capital. Television and the Internet have largely been boons to society. But like any tools, they can be used for objectionable purposes. As regular citizens, we would like to believe that our social norms are strong enough that (with occasional exceptions in the case of people with truly evil intent) fellow citizens are not going to use those tools to publicly humiliate us. Clearly, this belief is a naïve one, as numerous television shows and websites prove every day (as in the case of this lawsuit over a video posted on YouTube).