What a difference a TV makes

For a long time now, we've known that birthrate drops with development. I've tended to go along with the usual explanation that a higher birthrate makes sense with higher infant mortality and low economic security in old age; if those are addressed, then the birthrate falls, releasing wealth for other things than bringing children through early childhood until you can send them up chimneys (a reference to the UK's past history relating to this matter!). But perhaps there is another factor coming into view (literally): The source article is this:
What a difference a TV makes | Culture Making. The salient point relates to research in India and Brasil: "soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities." This is significant when the possibility of seeing such images is extended through relatively cheap TV sets and the spread of satellite signal with the effect: "Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn't just birthrates that changed as Globo's signal spread -- divorce rates went up, too."
The important thing to notice here is the way that a technology combined with a particular set of cultural products enables a new-to-them suite of options and way of seeing to be opened up and probably to be shared communally, discussed, assessed and imitated. There is a degree of hegemony being exercised; urban values overtaking 'traditional' rural ones. However, let's also note that they can be liberating. The lesson of the kinds of studies by Hebdige regarding subcultures is that people are adept, in appropriate circumstances, at bending cultural products to serve (some of) their interests often subverting them and re-purposing them in the process.

Of course the divorce dimension may seem alarming, and in many ways it may be. However, it may also reflect the possibility of women breaking from abusive relationships. And while I'm not saying I like divorce, it does seem to me that part of the concern in the background of the Bible's varied attitudes is probably concern for the economic and social security of women being ameliorated in a very patriarchal society. Jesus' words seem to take a pot shot at the disposable attitude to women's lives that 'liberal' interpretations of Mosaic law allowed to thrive. And while that's not the whole story, it seems to me to be an important dimension we neglect at our peril.