Few of us were up watching TV after midnight, August 1, 1981, to witness the debut of a newfangled cable channel called MTV; but before long, most of us were watching and talking about this visually stunning, radically experimental upstart channel.
Back then, MTV reached only 2.5 million American homes with its alluring blend of rock music videos. Today, MTV is an international Goliath, reaching more than a billion households.
Meanwhile, competitive pressures in the cable industry have forced MTV to fill out its daily programming with game shows and a host of other programs. In fact, some of the channel’s former fans now want to know, “Who took the ‘M’ out of MTV?”
Long before it tried to remake itself to fit into the cable mainstream, MTV had a profound impact on American youth culture. It’s to that legendary impact that we now turn a misty, nostalgic eye.
In the Beginning
Back in the 70s, promoters of the coming cable revolution proclaimed that their programming would revolutionize life as we earthlings knew it. Maybe because they were having us trade something that was free (broadcast television) for something that now costs most of us 50 bucks a month, they had to hype their wares.
By the 1980s, it was clear that cable TV was a bigger and more vast wasteland than its broadcast predecessor. Cable executives were looking for anything they could put on the air so long as it was cheap and a few people would watch it.
That’s when an exec named John A. Lack came up with the basic idea of MTV: play music videos, which are provided free by the record companies, 24 hours a day. The strategy worked, reaching millions of viewers in the key 18-34 demographic so desirable to advertisers, who were soon lining up to pay MTV huge sums of money.
At the very least, MTV was radio with pictures; but many cultural observers were convinced that MTV was so much more. In a December 1989 series of articles on the 80s, The Washington Post said MTV was “perhaps the most influential single cultural product of the decade.” In a lengthy paragraph, the Post summarized some of the cable channel’s most important contributions to the area of style:
“From Benneton to Flashdance, from Madonna to ‘Miami Vice,’ American culture today is full of artifacts MTV made possible. Devised by TV babies for TV babies, it was fast, both anticipating and promoting the grazing and zipping and zapping that became the leading new verbs of a decade hooked on control and speed. It taught television and movies a language of faster cuts and more telegraphic continuity. It taught fashion trends with the speed of light to the children of middle America. Advertising directors watched MTV as a benchmark of visual style, and borrowing from it produced an entirely new form of seduction.”
This article wasn’t the first to draw attention to MTV’s potential power to influence young buyers. From the beginning, critics referred to the channel as round-the-clock free ads, interrupted only by paid ads. Writer Lloyd Billingsley hammered home this point in Christianity Today: “The audience, for the most part, is a goose-stepping Konsumerjugend with disposable income, living under a dictatorship of freedom and waiting to be told what to do and buy.”
A Lasting Impact
Aside from its influence on TV, movies and marketing, MTV may have permanently altered the way the Baby Boomer generation receives and processes information. This has had a profound impact on virtually anyone who wants to communicate virtually anything to virtually anybody, including traditional news outlets like TV and newspapers.
This point wasn’t lost on Robert Pittman, an MTV cofounder and son of a Methodist minister who said in a 1986 interview that today’s “TV babies” see TV “as replacement for other forms of information and entertainment.”
Pittman’s prophecy was more accurate than he could’ve imagined. During the 2000 presidential campaign, millions of American young people got their political news from sources such as “Late Night with David Letterman” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
Pittman also predicted the contemporary challenges faced by Christian preachers and youth workers trying to communicate the gospel to their hearers in a visual age.
“They have a much different way of dealing with information than the older generation,” said Pittman. “They don’t require a narrative line to take in information or entertainment. They readily respond to more elusive sense impressions communicated through feelings, mood and emotion.”
Billy Graham certainly wasn’t the first to realize things had changed; but by 1996 his evangelistic organization intentionally was copying the MTV style. The Billy Graham World Television Series, which aired on or around April 14 of that year in more than 200 countries, featured messages from Graham, intercut with real-life-style vignettes (a woman leaving her husband and a man committing suicide) and fast-paced Christian music videos.
A New World
In 1991, MTV celebrated its 10th anniversary with a press release that bragged, “Presented in stereo, MTV’s overall on-air environment is unpredictable and irreverent.” Today, as the channel prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the unpredictability is gone, though the irreverence lives on, as does the channel’s long-term cultural impact.
How can teachers and preachers communicating to today’s young people learn from the MTV revolution? Here are a few ideas:
1. Teach with intentionality. Don’t assume because a group of kids is looking in your direction that they are actually understanding or even hearing what you say. Rather, it’s your responsibility to communicate the things they need to hear in a way that connects with their media-saturated brains.
2. Practice pacing. You may have 90 minutes worth of ideas to present but don’t give a 90-minute lecture. In the post-MTV era, attention spans have dwindled. That doesn’t mean you have to turn everything you do into a Las Vegas spectacular. On the other hand, if you don’t respect your audience’s limits and expectations, you’ll be lecturing to zombies.
3. Find ways to integrate media into your activities. If a movie makes your point better than you can, play five minutes of the video clip. Encourage your kids to scavenge today’s pop culture for signs of spiritual life and share these with the group. They won’t have to look far to find movies, TV shows and pop songs that wrestle with spiritual themes. By helping them consciously scan the horizon for these themes, you’ll help them practice media awareness, which is an urgent need in our media-mad culture.
4. Examine how MTV markets to kids. Buy a copy of “The Merchants of Cool,” a disturbing documentary about how corporate America is going after the largest and most lucrative generation of teens in history. One of the most intriguing segments shows a researcher from MTV who visits a New Jersey teen and conducts an “ethnography study.” The researcher asks the young boy what kinds of clothes he has in his closet and what CDs and videos are his current favorites. The study is videotaped and played to heads of other MTV departments so they know youngsters’ hot buttons.
“The Merchants of Cool” is available from PBS video by calling 1.800.645.4727. There is also a “Merchants of Cool” teacher’s guide available at the PBS Web site.
