On Oct 4, 2010, at 10:16 AM, William Conger wrote: > All of reality is now a con in the sense of being packaged as > entertainment via Reality Shows and other media.
"Everything on television is television." It's all packaged, edited, and much of it scripted. I watched parts of one episode of the original Survivor and instantly concluded it was all sham. The "reality" contestants were "stranded" on an Indonesian island and had to live by their wits, catching and eating fish, washing themselves with rainwater or something -- while ten feet away were the camera crew eating snacks from coolers, drinking bottle water, etc. That and the premise of the contestants struggling with various competitions together was sufficiently inane to turn me off, but the rank racism of the staging made me want to throw rocks at the TV set. Everything on television is scripted, planned, edited, packaged, falsified, etc. The least scripted are live sports events, but even the completely unscripted action of the game is packaged in layers and layers of calculated television structure. Perhaps the most minimal of television programs (besides the city council on cable-access) is Brian Lamb's Booknotes on C-SPAN. He sits in a plain studio stage, introduces a book, and then asks the author in the other chair a simple question: "Why did you write this book?" The author answers at length, and then Lamb asks, "And then, what happened?" The author answers fully, and then Lamb asks, "What did you do in 1992?" And the author answers, etc. (This is in stark contrast, btw, to Charlie Rose's extremely prolix manner of interviewing guests.) Everything on television is television. And that, in itself, is offered as some kind of sales gimmick. How often do you see some item in a store that says, "As seen on TV" on the label or sales display? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
