Pop Culture: Reality TV

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Reality TV

For a while, I kept thinking that “reality” TV couldn’t possibly get any worse, given our current selection of programming. On any given day, you can choose from watching a spoiled 16 year old girl’s birthday party (hilariously parodied on South Park, I might add), a group of 7 or 8 stereotyped caricatures living in the “real world”, a bunch of D-list celebrities living together in a house, the same D-list celebrities getting the crap scared out of them in a supposedly haunted house, or a has-been rapper picking out a new girlfriend. Apparently it doesn’t matter whether the shows are in fact “reality”- the only prerequisite now seems to be entertainment.

However, I was reading the news online the other day, and stumbled across this gem. It could be worse, I guess- we could be subjected to what they put on TV in the Netherlands. Yikes.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/12/05/television.dutch.reut/index.html

No comments:

Post a Comment

Mass-observation, in brief:

Mass-observation is a process by which one simply goes out and observes the world around them. The focus is on the basic aspects of everyday life and everyday interactions, the little unnoticed things that we each do and can't explain and often don't understand, but are integral to our relationship to the culture around us . Our focus is on the relationship between our everyday habits and pop-culture. We are not seeking an ouright answer as to what pop-culture is, for the aim of mass-observation is not to answer direct questions but to pool data and arrive at some new possibility for understanding our cultural habitus. With pop-culture we have an ambiguous, yet well understood lens by which to observe our present culture, and with this project we hope to cull information gleamed from observing in order to somehow make sense of "pop-culture."