I watched a show called “What Would You Do?” where they set people up in these strange and awkward scenarios and then see how they react. Like staging a date where the guy slips a white powder into his date’s drink while she’s in the bathroom, making sure that someone else at the bar sees, then waiting to see if that person says anything. Sure it’s hilarious to us, watching from our little couches while we munch on snacks, but there’s a big problem here. We’re getting amusement out of other people’s discomfort. We enjoy seeing people’s emotions get played with, that little kid inside us likes poking and pissing people off. What the hell is wrong with TV, the media, and all of us as a society? We’re so used to this stuff that we don’t even realize how bad it is. Isn’t almost every reality show the same? You sit on your ass and watch other people get played with as if they were in some weird, twisted game. They cry, they fight, they get scared, but all we do is sit there and watch to see what happens next. Ironically, we’re watching someone else living their life, while we sit and waste away ours. This is largely our fault, by the way. They only show what people watch. Once the networks can’t make money through advertising, the show is dead. Of course the people who start these things are to blame as well. They know what they’re doing, and they don’t care if the quality of programming falls, let alone if what they show on TV is dumbing people down more and more every year. It’s all about profits, and what makes money makes it on the screen. If we didn’t watch that useless nonsense and demanded something better, at least slightly intellectual, we could probably get it. But why bother? It’s so much easier to shut off your brain, watch reality shows on MTV and pretend like you don’t know that there is something horribly wrong with what you’re watching. (There’s a great article answering the question of “why bother?” by Michael Pollan. You can read it here: http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=92)
I’m not innocent of this either. I’ve been on winter break from school for about a month now, and have wasted far too much time in front of the TV. I’ve quit the death box cold turkey in the past, staying away for over six months. I feel like it may be time for another stop. It seems I’ve relapsed. But regardless of what we’re watching, we can all do with less TV. Not even because there are more useful things to do with our time or any of the other things your parents will tell you. People can spend their time any way they want. But we shouldn’t watch TV because it’s not real. The world you see on that screen has very little to do with the world you see off it. It’s a fabricated world, and the more you try to make yourself or your life resemble the world on the screen, the more you stop being yourself and start becoming exactly what they hope you’ll be. A follower who’ll watch the shows, buy the products, read the magazines, go to the movies, buy the clothes, the makeup, the sunglasses, and most importantly, make them some money. Actually not some, a lot of money. And by “they,” I mean the people who really run these things. The five major corporations controlling nearly all aspects of the media: Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, Bertelsmann, and News Corp. Together, these five dominate over TV, newspapers, magazines, books and more. (This information comes from The New Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian, a great book on the history and nature of the media). I don’t know many details on this issue, and some may have changed since the book was published in 2004, but it doesn’t affect the point I’m hoping to make. Very few people are controlling a giant that influences millions. How can we trust them? I don’t think we can and I don’t think we should. Let’s all turn off the tube, and I bet that our opinion of it will drastically change.
