-Terrance, Heauton Timorumenos,
I am not an intellectual. I’m not even intelligent by the classical definition—not that I am sure of the actual definition because I’m a fearful if I look it up in the dictionary it would make me upset. And nobody wants that...
I used to write a blog nearly every week for about a year and a half. I have since been on hiatus from bloghood. The main purpose of my blog was to discuss my life without a great job or steady girlfriend. Now that I have both, blogging has been on the back burner for quite some time. But I’m trying to climb back in. The following blog should certainly not be called a “study” in humanity. Simply, it's not a “study” based on the definition of “study,” (which I sadly looked up). The following blog will not and should not be used in the advancement of humanity. In fact, if you are either an alien or a cultured historian of the year 3037 who is grazing over the scope of ancient (2012) internet for the “keys to the past,” please do not use this as a source in your paper. These are just simple observations from a dude in his pajamas. Then why read this? Well, you have done sillier things. I guess we all have. We are a world of silliness—but the good kind.
Why do we do anything really? Listen to music, watch reality TV, watch HBO, follow sports, read books, drink Pinot Noir, drink Miller Lite, play video games, people watch, people watch, people watch—life seems like nothing but a constant game of people watching. We just want to know what other people are doing. It comes from the innate curiosity of figuring out why we were born with brains. What makes us so special? Our brains fucking rock and why is that? Human brains are like the bees knees.
We figured out how to do so much; from building a fire to building a killer playlist in our iTunes. The thing is, as soon as we started figuring shit out, we said to ourselves, “How am I figuring shit out?” “Why am I figuring shit out?” and “what kind of shit are you figuring out?”
I work in Reality TV, which was the antithesis of my earlier strangled prism of the uniformly non-conformist—“pathetic is the stupid world and it’s unappreciative philistines plugged into the brain of the lowest common denominator, bad taste in music, worst taste in art”—viewpoint I had on the culture. It started throughout my childhood of basic cable as I witnessed reality TV drip into the blood stream of American culture. For a while there, I was with the majority of people in thinking that the very essence of reality TV was revoking the esteemed merit of creativity. How could theater, over the course of a few hundred years, go from Shakespeare to a dude named Tech on Real World Hawaii? In my days of reading Kerouac under my parent’s dime, I originally just thought we were getting dumber. The more evolved we got, the less complex, the less sophisticated; I thought to myself. However, as I developed into a man of the workplace and out of the world of academia, on my own, I have discovered reality TV is not hurting culture, certainly not, it’s simply doing what we have been wanting to do since the dawn of civilization. It helps us understand the why, how, and what kind of shit are people are figuring out.
We enjoy reality TV because it’s a simple way of looking at other people’s problem solving skills. Actually, it’s quite remarkable. In years before, we simply looked at journals of the past as described by news writers and discovered by historians, in order to even get a glimpse into the minds of fellow humans. My 7th grade social studies teacher told me, “we study the past, so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.” (Or something like that. Honestly in 7th grade I was more concerned about hiding unforeseeable surprises arising and perfecting the art of the “flip up”).
It would be simple math: Napoleon was short, so he wanted to compensate his height by taking over a few countries here and there. We understand the thought process of Napoleon based on the information given at that particular time, which was obviously limited. We can kind of relate to Napoleon on a human level—I mean, who hasn't wanted to take over the world at one point another. You know, to prove to everyone in your 7th grade class that you weren't just a kid hiding the little tent in his pants. Simply put, we could only guess what people were thinking back then. Not just in the mind of a warlord, but in the mind of the carpenter, the farmer, the guy who hunted alligators in the swamps of Louisiana (seek Swamp People on History Channel).
For centuries we wanted to figure out the thought process of fellow man. We trusted historians to decode the information given at the time. Now, as information is as plentiful as the hairs of a scruffy, little puppy dog, we are beginning to grasp a better understanding of the human thought process. The intellectual will argue that Reality TV shows no better understanding of man, rather a glorification of a Dorito chip centered mind. But isn’t there a Dorito chip in all of us? Isn’t it that Dorito chip what keeps us going? Whether we spend our lives looking at the world from an intelligent standpoint or a sinuous standpoint or a standpoint in which our main focus is just to get though it, we are all kind of just finding ways to justify the means. In this we look to other people for help. The underlining statement of Reality TV is based on the fact that we judge others in order to judge ourselves.
When I was in 9th grade or so, the finale of Survivor drew 55 million viewers. As an astute historian/9th grader, I deemed it the biggest cultural event on TV since the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Not to toot my own 9th grade horn, but in a way, I was right. Survivor took seemingly regular people and dropped them off on an island in a “real life” scenario which was supposed to emulate a real life event. People have to choose to kill and eat, or in this case, kick out of the tribe a person they deemed “unsatisfactory.” I imagine if this were an actual, non-made for TV, event, it would take several months before a tribe member to be eaten or killed. For the purposes of a TV network, they had to bestow “challenges” which would determine who gets eaten (or sent home to air conditioning and a microwave). Come on, every person has at one point thought about being deserted on a desert island. This was the closest you can get to actually witnessing it unfold in front of your televised eyes.
As season one of Survivor ended, we watched live as one unit. One American culture, all 55 million of us. What was so astonishing at that moment was it (I think) was the first scenario based reality TV show. Of course Real World and Road Rules were the shows that really put reality TV on the map, Survivor was the true Da Vinci of its genre (I may be the first person in the history of written thought to compare Survivor to Da Vinci, but just roll with it.) Remember, Survivor was the first major network show—before you could watch anything your heart desires on the internet or on demand in your living room—to put a wide variety of people in a certain, very unique situation.
During its success, a lot people made the argument that Real World and Road Rules were the first of its kind and should have been given the proper trophies of originality. I actually remember a radio DJ in Philadelphia screaming about the merits the Real World and how Survivor simply stole the idea of reality based television. Though Real World was the first of its kind, it was sold to a very specific demographic. The show took random 20 something year old strangers and just dumped them in a nice house to fight about dishes. Now this happens all the time through Craigslist. The beauty of Survivor was that it doesn’t target an age demographic, it targets a certain curiosity found deep down in all of us.
The Survivor Finale was such an event because every one of its viewers pretended to be in the shoes of the contestants. Every character could relate to any demographic. The only characteristic somebody would need to have in order to enjoy Survivor, is that of human instinct. We watched Survivor because it gave us, as one entity glued by the spirit of empathy, another chance to think about ourselves.
We love thinking about ourselves. We love showing our thoughts to as many people as humanly possible. (Thus blogs). We also like seeing what other people think about. Again, it’s the why, how, what other people think about, that concerns us on an individual level. From the dawn of time we wanted to know the way other people handle things. This input/output relationship of culture has been going on since man starting writing on walls.
It began with that first human who picked up a stone and started drawing on walls. He wanted to show everyone that he killed an ox. And I guarantee when somebody came over for caveman tea and entered his fellow caveman's stone walls, he looked around and saw the carved drawings and possibly said, “Oh, I killed an Ox too. How did you do it?” The visitor Caveman looks closer to the picture on the wall and says out loud, “Oh, the old stick in hand and yelling loudly technique. I do that too, sometimes.”
The human element of destruction and the thirst for superiority has never gone away. We watch reality TV because we believe, in some way deep down inside, that we want to feel superior. We want to feel that we would have made better choices than the subjects on TV. We feel the same blood cells running though our bodies as we did when we watched slaved soldiers in the lions den thousands of years ago.
We watch Reality TV for the same reasons we stare at car accidents. We like to see other people’s failures because it allows us escape from our own. On the flip, we enjoy others successes because it reminds us deep inside what we are capable of. The basic premise of entertainment is to share experiences. Our values, our goals. And Reality TV is just a different medium to accomplish this visceral idea. To say Reality TV is worthless to the growth of culture is like saying the instinctual human idea of empathy is worthless. It is like saying humans are worthless. Well, I’m here to say we are not. I am pro-human and therefore, I am pro-Reality TV. (Both of which, to a degree)...
I believe when Reality TV becomes a problem is when the audiences main focus in their own lives is to suffocate themselves in the lives of others, the people on the screen. This can be said of everything. Reality TV is simply the Doughnut of entertainment. Just like the doughnut, it is not the issue of the incising substance existing, but rather the overuse of the substance by the consumer. The same can be said with Sports, Film, Music, Travel, Blogging, and Pizza.
I guess the moral of the story is don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Loving this! Welcome back I'll be sure to share. -Beth
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