Rural purge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge

86 90 5 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

ipnon2• 5 years ago

Another phenomenon that accelerated in the early 1970s is the bifurcation of the American public into a cognitive elite and cognitive normal. Colleges became exceedingly efficient at filtering entrants by IQ, with the typical college student 1 standard deviation above the mean IQ, and with some prestigious colleges like Harvard having an average student multiple SDs above the mean. Simultaneously business administration became the purview of the same cognitive elite.

Could the rural purge have been the result of network executives alienated and at odds with the viewership they were nominally at the behest of?

Urbanization did not increase significantly at this time, so it seems cultural factors are the better explanation.

kingsuper202• 5 years ago

That doesn't explain earlier network television. There was something of a push for high-quality stage drama, jazz, avant-garde comedy in addition to urban situation comedies (I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners).

My guess is that somebody does a successful show and everyone else jumps in the pool.

ghaff3• 5 years ago

That article (and a couple of articles/blogs it references) tries to coherently explain why TV changed like it did during that period. The better explanation is probably that network programming--probably even more so than other aspects of culture--was very much a fashion business. It may also reflect the personal preferences of a handful of network execs. Furthermore, the 70s were definitely not a back to the city period so its hard to use that as an explanation.

lmohseni• 5 years ago

Cognitive elite? Or cultural elite. Given that IQ scores purport to measure cognitive faculty but instead measure cultural fluency.

(Changed pretend to purport)

whatshisface4• 5 years ago

That's not as true as one would hope. There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares, unless you're from the jungle and have grown up never seeing any squares. (The theory that people who grew up not looking at corners would be less able to perceive square shapes has received some attention, but we have to admit that doesn't have much relevance to people living in modern countries like America or India .)

Now, cultural fluency questions have appeared on IQ tests, especially in the past. However that's not so much an attack on the idea of "g" as it is a problem with antiquated methods of measuring it.

That's not to say that IQ tests are that accurate. The biggest confounder I know of is ADHD, which causes the tests to come out five whole points lower on average. I'm sure there are others.

zionic• 5 years ago

Is this true? Plenty of IQ tests are extremely simple pattern recognition. The science of measuring human cognitive performance is plagued by cultural taboos more so than process issues.

brobdingnagians3• 5 years ago

That is an important distinction (or at least the idea that IQ only measures a very narrow and not so significant part of a persons intelligence). I would surmise that a lot of those graduating with high IQs have also acquired the arrogance to believe that they should manage society, not just businesses. They can point to IQ scores and high salaries to prove their supposed superiority. In that way, IQ has become a cultural myth for reinforcing mandate to rule; we even have magazines comparing the IQs of different presidents throughout history, as estimated by pseudo-psychologists. The cultural elite have become something of a ruling/chattering class, more so than before, with greater and greater divides between different sectors of society. It is all quite ironic, since it could be argued that the elites today have less critical thinking abilities than our classically educated ancestors, many of whom expressly rejected a belief in elite rule. Fixation on IQ and wealth can be like the Cyrenians who wasted their wealth teaching their war horses to dance, then getting defeated when the enemy played flutes in battle, causing their horses to dance.

dcolkitt• 5 years ago

IQ is highly correlated with reaction times.[1] It's extremely difficult to explain that result if you assume IQ is purely cultural, rather than neurological.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5608941/

voldacar• 5 years ago

I'm gonna need a source that "cultural fluency" determines your ability to rotate weirdly-shaped little 3d objects around in your head

philwelch5• 5 years ago

I think you’re half-right there.

To my understanding, IQ tests do measure generalized intelligence, and a lot of standardized tests correlate to them fairly well.

However, elite universities have been deemphasizing standardized tests for decades in favor of fuzzier admissions criteria. This, among other things, enables discrimination against minorities that overperform on standardized tests (historically Jews, currently Asians).

You’re right that the elite class is a self-selected cultural elite, but standardized tests are less of a tool and more of an impediment to their self-selection process.

glaukopis• 5 years ago

A nitpick orthogonal to your main point, but I would argue anecdotally that there's no way elite schools have an average undergraduate IQ "multiple standard deviations" above the mean - unless by multiple, you mean "two". Any integer over that, and at 4,000,000 students graduating high school a year, and 3sigma working out to ~1/1000, there literally wouldn't be enough smart kids to go around, especially considering a majority of those students probably don't go to T10 schools anyways due to the fact that college isn't an idealized market.

Having gone to an elite school for undergrad, I'd argue most students were around 2sigma or slightly below, but almost universally also had 2sigma levels of work ethic, self-discipline, and goal-seeking.

ipnon2• 5 years ago

What I meant is that elite universities like Harvard and Stanford are capturing something like 90% of those 3 sigma high school graduates, not that all Harvard and Stanford students are 3 sigma. That was not the case 100 years ago, and in the 1970s it was a rapidly increasing trend. Thank you for calling out this ambiguity.

germinalphrase• 5 years ago

I did not go to an elite university though I have family members who did. The eye general attitude seems to be that “the smart kids at your high school were probably just as smart as the kids at [Harvard], but at [Harvard] all the kids are that smart”.

cigaser• 5 years ago

Foreign students?

cafard• 5 years ago

I'm not getting into the whole IQ thing, but have you watched some of what was on TV in the later 1970s? Treat yourself to a binge viewing of "Love Boat", "Lenny and Squiggy", or "Three's Company" or even ostensibly serious stuff like "Marcus Welby" or "Lou Grant". When you have recovered, tell me again about the cognitively elite at the network executive level.

cdot2• 5 years ago

Basically the studios realized that catering to older audiences was not a good long-term strategy.

_hyn33• 5 years ago

Basically the studios realized that catering to older audiences was not a good long-term strategy.

Or perhaps believed instead of realized, but that conclusion was not necessarily borne out in the data.

Fox News' later success (absolutely dominating cable news both in the demo and out, more or less since its inception) seems to demonstrate that the demise of all of these shows at the same time left a vacuum for a certain type of programming that probably still persists to this day.

akiselev2• 5 years ago

Which would make sense if there's an X:1 ratio of younger to older audiences - probably relative to future potential disposable income rather than size - and the two groups prefer vastly different content from each other. The former group is large enough to support several large competitors but competing over the latter might have been a losing proposition for the major networks since none of them could get enough critical mass to turn a profit off that market.

For example, take major brands like Pepsi, Coca Cola, GM, and Ford that have tons of money to throw at everyone and a niche company like Lear Capital that sells gold and silver. Some content draws enough big advertisers to fill up 100% of the ad slots while running up the price but if Pepsi/Coca-Cola/GM do not think running ads during "Little House on the Prairie" is worth the marginal benefit, that leaves Ford and Lear Capital to make the show profitable. Before Fox cornered their market, Lear Capital might not reach enough eyeballs in their target demographic to be able to buy enough ads on "Little House on the Praire" to make the show profitable because its in the same time slot as "Antiques Roadshow". Obviously Ford won't pick up the rest of the tab for one show so the major networks end up dropping the older audiences' shows one by one when there isn't enough advertiser demand. All the while, bidding up the cost of ads on popular shows depletes the big brands' ad budgets even further.

Then, Fox comes along, and since most of the big brands need to push brand awareness their TV ad budgets grow (it's a new major network!). They buy their usual ads and all of those niche players who wanted to advertise to that demographic on TV but couldn't because it was spread too thin can come together on a major network that caters just to their needs.

drewcoo• 5 years ago

The advertisers that paid for TV shows saw teenagers as a largely untapped market with a lot of disposable income.

mywittyname2• 5 years ago

They weren't wrong. The Baby Boomers were the first modern generation to enjoy economic determination at such a young age.

majormajor• 5 years ago

Both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies had dropped from the Nielsen top 30 by the 1970–71 season, yet both shows continued to win their respective time slots and had loyal followings, warranting renewal for another season.

Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Continually declining popularity seems like it could easily also be said to warrant cancellation.

_hyn33• 5 years ago

Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article.

Wikipedia has changed a lot in the last decade.

eesmith• 5 years ago

That text was added 11 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rural_purge&diff=...

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

Flipping over to the "Talk" tab, I think it's clear that this isn't a good example of a Wikipedia article. Multiple comments about lack of neutral tone, and it's been flagged twice for removal (the first time, the decision was keep; the second, the decision was "no consensus.")

I don't know that this article has a long life ahead of it.

lazyasciiart• 5 years ago

That article doesn’t even convince me that “rural purge” is a phrase ever used outside it.

thrower123• 5 years ago

There are still networks (MeTV for example) that make a living off of re-airing those shows.

The popularity of all of the "Jane Goodall studying the gorillas" redneck porn on Discovery and National Geographic and History Channel, along with more prestigious dramas like Yellowstone or Justified or Longmire would indicate to me that this is still a very profitable demographic to target, albeit distasteful to the major television executives.

noir_lord• 5 years ago

It helps that in the case of Justified and Longmire both where excellent shows that happened to have a country/rural setting - Yellowstone is merely a decent show by comparison.

Justified should be talked about like the Soprano's/Breaking Bad or The Wire - it really was that brilliantly done.

floren2• 5 years ago

Longmire gets a lot of credit purely for showing lots of beautiful New Mexico countryside! I also recall that the story was pretty good, but it's been a while.

SpicyLemonZest2• 5 years ago

I think this kind of thing is ultimately what I like most about new media. A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding: as long as it has a loyal following and an enthusiastic creator, it'll keep coming out. A lot of my favorite content probably wouldn't make it if they had to air on CBS.

duxup4• 5 years ago

A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding

Is there a reason to think this is the case?

I find YouTube to be the land of copycats and homogenization just as much as anywhere else. If anything the desire to attract clicks, views, thumbs seems more immediate than TV.

SpicyLemonZest2• 5 years ago

I'm surprised it's a question, to be honest. My favorite Youtube series include:

* funny Mario Maker levels

* pop history comedy videos

* teardowns of random historical firearms

* cooking from reconstructed historical recipes

So it's hard for me to look at this and see homogenization.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

Because YouTube doesn't have to filter for slotting content into a finite amount of broadcast time, it doesn't need executives deciding what programming is worth investing a timeslot in.

... but the sum of all YouTube viewers still have a finite amount of time per day to consume the content, so the game flips from "elevator-pitching some executive your idea is worth risking a highly-valuable timeslot" to "pulling in hundreds of thousands of individual audience members to like, comment, and subscribe."

Much like there are multiple ways to convince an exec, there are multiple ways to attract an audience. While they can look like the same game if one turns one's head and squints, they're mechanically very different.

(... possibly worth noting: YouTube does have premium original programming, which is slightly closer to the old "elevator-pitch your idea" model. But that's more to build exclusive property for its premium offering than to fill timeslots, and one doesn't have to partner with YouTube to reach a broad audience).

duxup4• 5 years ago

I'm always curious about what is featured in entertainment vs reality.

This was mostly because of my contact / travels with younger folks outside the US who I would talk to. I was supersized by how may other younger people seemed to have their view of America heavily influenced by imported TV shows / movies. A surprising number seemed to assume that everyone was a TV 'type', school life was like a TV show, and the assumption that most everyone was wealthy like the shows at the time.

This was well before the age of the internet.

As far as the actual media trends, I think it usually just follows fads and trends. I don't think there's a real 'motivation' behind it outside getting eyeballs on TV.

CountDrewku3• 5 years ago

Anecdotally I've found this to be true when discussing the US with European friends I have. They think our schooling looks exactly like the sitcoms (e.g. Boy Meets World, Fresh Prince). They also seem to think we're all partially cowboys or at least like John McClane in Die Hard. They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

To be fair everyone makes this mistake with every culture they are familiar with yet not experienced enough to understand the variety and nuance. We go with the stereotypes because there's some truth to it. For example, there is still to this day a big cowboy subculture in America, it's just not everyone. And no not everyone in West Philadelphia born and raised shoots bball after school but quite a few do.

philwelch5• 5 years ago

They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis.

To be fair, Americans also believe this.

hyperman1• 5 years ago

It is sometimes hard to filter reality from fiction, when tv is the input. You have schools preparing for mass shootings and banks giving guns when opening an account. You have swat teams demolishing a home because someone breaks in. Tell me again how you're not all partially cowboys.

I have no idea how many guns an average American sees when walking around (excluding cops and soldiers), but I'd think at least 1 a year. In all euro countrys I've been to, my answer is 0.

lastofthemojito• 5 years ago

I'm always curious about what is featured in entertainment vs reality.

I always feel that way with the jobs that TV and movie characters are assigned. Entertainment jobs are vastly over-represented (as so much of art is somewhat autobiographical). Straightforward, well understood jobs like doctors, cops and teachers are pretty well represented. Then those jobs that often require further explanation whenever a stranger hears that job title are much less represented - how many actuaries or data analysts or logistics managers do you see in film? Approximately none, but I think more of them exist in the real world than all of the screenwriters you see on TV.

klipt• 5 years ago

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreWr...

"Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to Write What You Know, which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery."

nitrogen• 5 years ago

The dad in Christmas Vacation was a food chemist developing a non-nutritive varnish to make cereal stay crunchy longer, but the way that line is delivered makes it clear it's mocking the job.

regnull• 5 years ago

Lots of things went wrong in 1971: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

jcranmer• 5 years ago

You do have to admire the chutzpah of someone pointing bold arrows to the data points in 1971 when the graph in question shows a clear inflection point in 1980 instead (or in many cases near the end, no clear inflection point at all).

st_goliath• 5 years ago

Says a company that wants to sell me Bitcoin and ends the data dump with a quote vaguely implying that the evil government is to blame.

In other news, smoking cigarettes is good for your health, says this old study I have here. Please just ignore where the data is from and who funded it, it's totally trustworthy!

imtringued• 5 years ago

If you were to ask me the arrow should point at 2000. It's a much more interesting date than 1971.

Simulacra2• 5 years ago

I grew up watching Nick at Night, and I wish we still had shows like that today. They were idealized versions of Americana, but I think it was closer to what viewers wanted believed about America. I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better.

floren2• 5 years ago

I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better.

You'd have to get TV writers that want to understand rural communities first, instead of painting dumb-shit broad strokes from fuzzy memories of watching Green Acres as a kid. Mostly, though, they just do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_N4k5IQI

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

There was Parks and Recreation, I guess.

litoorachure2• 5 years ago

Oh, this sounds like fun. It depends on how you define 'rural', but off the top of my head:

Parks & Recreation, Schitt's Creek, Breaking Bad, Ozark, Sons of Anarchy, Dallas, and that's without even looking at the Discovery Channel.

IMO we need to talk to each other more if we want to understand each other better, though. Not through dehumanizing screens, but in person and in good faith. When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with a stranger in a train, airport, store etc?

philwelch5• 5 years ago

Breaking Bad takes place in Albuquerque and I’m pretty sure Dallas takes place in Dallas. Those are cities.

mbg721• 5 years ago

I don't know that something like Green Acres (complete with climbing the telephone pole to make a call, and one of the most influential local citizens being a pig) is going to build bridges of understanding. It's a silly show that's more about putting a rational main character into a setting where nothing makes sense. If anything, the laughs are because the universe of the country rubes is so ridiculous, yet so readily accepted. (Similarly, my Appalachian grandmother really did not think the Beverly Hillbillies was funny.)

skynet-9000• 5 years ago

I agree, but when compared to Andy Griffith (the country rube sheriff?), and everything just seemed more "wholesome"; perhaps an idealistic tale of days gone by, but also perhaps an aspirational tale for those who might value the community sometimes found in small, rural places.

mikestew• 5 years ago

They were idealized versions of Americana...

Idealized by city folk, maybe. As one who grew up in a rural area, when I watched the shows it was more "let's make fun of the simple country folk and their strange ways". There was no idealization, most of it were television shows that looked to be written by city people that have never been past their city's beltway, who imagine what country life might be like. Poster children include Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies.

I do miss Hee Haw, though. R. I. P., Messrs. Owen and Clark.

mywittyname2• 5 years ago

It seems like this was more driven by a desire to have television shows that addressed real world problems. "Rural" here is basically a euphemism for "sterile world where nothing bad actually happens." It's just easier to sterilize a cabin in the woods. Plus, the country has always been idyllic in American culture.

This was an era where pregnancy was a forbidden topic (among so much more) and where parents were shown sleeping in separate beds. It's not surprising that people eventually grew to hate this fantasy world.

Ishmaeli• 5 years ago

"[...]ratings indicate that the American public prefer hillbillies, cowboys, and spies."

This kind of correlation has always seemed specious to me. It's the streetlight effect—it's hard to quantify why a show is popular we'll just assume it's because of the genre, since that's easy to identify.

I remember when Desperate Housewives took off in 2004, and studio execs assumed that viewers suddenly wanted prime time soaps. And they released a bunch more prime time soaps that were lousy and flopped.

I think viewers want quality content, regardless of genre. Genre is just a heuristic device.

splithalf• 5 years ago

Costs and returns matter to money people.

Rural purge

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