One wonders why people think banning something is the only way to stop it. Take the liquor ban, implemented by a number cities when lockdown measures were imposed. The liquor ban did not stop the availability of contraband liquor in these areas. It only encouraged citizens to violate quarantine by going out to other cities, like Makati, where liquor is being sold legally.
Banning something does not stop people from consuming it. It just opens the door to other markets, including the black market. It also helps make the banned item even more popular. For example, banning books helped turn them into bestsellers; banning movies, into blockbusters. Ban a video or a story on the Internet and more people will look for it.
When the Chinese government clamped down on Chinese social-media users who were providing information about the Wuhan coronavirus, it only led to resentment, which made people posting the information more popular.
Psychologists have a professional term for this—reactance or psychological reactance, which is “an unpleasant motivational arousal that occurs when persons, rules or regulations threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms” or “when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives” (from the book Understanding Psychological Reactance).
According to the reactance theory, depriving someone of something only increases resistance to this deprivation and can have the opposite effect.
Call it what you want, but for all intents and purposes, stopping the regular broadcast operations of ABS-CBN is a ban, because no other network or broadcasting company’s license suffered a similar fate—and such a ban has caused similar unintended consequences.
Sure, there’s a chilling effect on media freedom, but forcing the network to go off the air also seems to have made it more popular, as millions of Filipinos are now accessing ABS-CBN programs and content through Facebook, YouTube and other social media and digital platforms not covered by the National Telecommunications Commission order. Stopping ABS-CBN is an example of psychological reactance at work, as it made many Filipinos significantly more motivated to access it.
The closure has also provoked quite a backlash across the globe; it was featured by the likes of The New York Times, Washington Post, British Broadcasting Corp., CNN, Al Jazeera and other international media. The move was criticized in particular for having been implemented during a global health crisis when the country’s main sources of information should always be accessible.
It has certainly made many people more sympathetic to ABS-CBN, if not at least more interested in the issues surrounding the closure, whether they agree with it or not, something that could work to the network’s advantage, especially now that it is more accessible in the current and always-evolving digital platforms.
Let’s face it, television is no longer the king of Philippine households, as more than a few studies and surveys have shown that Filipinos now spend more time surfing the Internet than watching TV.
Technological developments like high-speed Internet and increasing ownership of connected devices, such as smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing digital media usage in Southeast Asia, surpassing time spent on traditional media like television, radio and print, according to a Nielsen Southeast Asia Digital Consumer Report.
This is why TV stations like ABS-CBN have gone multimedia (even before the network was closed), along with their advertisers, who have increasingly found it more cost-effective to reach audiences through the Internet and social media.
Perhaps, in a few years, when Internet penetration would equal that of TV, massive advertising campaigns would be done online, and most people would be instantly getting their information online too, where the message is not controlled and the lines are open for interaction. Perhaps this is already happening.
Perhaps in the near future, the Internet with all its tools and accessibility, would educate and empower voters as well as would-be politicians, and usher in a new politics altogether, one where patronage does not rule and the people truly have a voice.
If more people surf the Internet to view an “outlawed” TV station’s programs, this could make old-style politics obsolete. If this development can make government and media work better for the people, then all’s well that ends well.
Image credits: Jimbo Albanp