Your informed rants are an excellent illustration of the difference between the reality TV audiences you discuss and the clearly higher educational standard of previous generations. I see this as pure social engineering for venal purposes, both corporate financial interests and sociopolitical control mechanisms. This is directed by technocratic elites who, as Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul explained in his prescient and vital book "Voltaire's Bastards" 30 years ago, are themselves culturally illiterate, thanks to the deification of STEM culture. Just yesterday another British writer, Nina Welsch, put her finger on it when she described the phenomenon as "the nurseryfication of culture." https://thecritic.co.uk/the-nurseryfication-of-culture/
For some time now I've been saying that, while in the past in Western culture we were creating an adolescent culture (remember the "good old days" of sex appeal as the main motivator in ads and movies?), lately we've moved into an infantilized (when not nihilistic) culture. None of this, of course, is by accident. Social engineers like people who behave like infants because infants are 100% dependent on their caregivers—in this case, the State. The "pandemic" a prime example of this principle in operation.
Whereas, adolescents can be tricky to manage, since their minds are beginning to wake up and their impulses are often conflicted—thus, far less controllable than infants. Sex appeal has thus been replaced by both a parochial "let us tell you what to think" cultural messaging, combined with constant crises and shocks that cause the frontal cortex to go offline, driving the infantile into the arms of Mommy or Daddy State and its Woke catechism.
Note also the frequent use of primary colours on banners, badges and flags—something I think you originally pointed out, Graham. Primary colours are said to have strong visual appeal to children as young as kindergarten age. So it's appropriate that the level of popular entertainment be similarly lowbrow and below the belt.
Compare the average script of even a mass appeal TV series from the 1960s with today's reality TV to drive the point home. There was so much witty, intelligent dialogue in series like "The Saint" in Britain or even the comedy spy satire "Get Smart" in the US. You can see the deterioration in the decades since, especially if you compare series like "The Prisoner" or the original Star Trek, which relied heavily on Shakespearian and Greek mythological themes. After the "Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" series, even the Star Trek franchise has devolved to mere action-suspense movies in space with mostly witless or mere Woke dialogue.
I don't see reality TV and TikTok culture as innocent fun at all but as a debasement of the human intellect and spirit, and a calculated one at that. It's flushing down the toilet 2,500 years of human accomplishments in higher culture. It deserves to be ignored, even boycotted. We shouldn't give a damn if it makes us sound like old men lecturing young people. That succumbs to the false notion that people with decades of experience somehow have nothing to offer the young—another deliberately promoted lie that keeps mainstream culture infantilized.
What I got out of this is that I want to see that "Redneck" show and have a cognac.
Look, PT Barnum summarized the case well enough: "No man ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” I gather that observation would obtain in other geographies. If you've ever had the misfortune to accidentally scroll your remote onto a Japanese television game show, you know what I mean. If you can figure that stuff out or take more than 10 minutes trying to figure it out, you're a better man than I am.
There is high art and low art and stuff in between. I think there has always been a market for the guilty pleasure of mindless entertainment - romance novels, B-grade science fiction movies, reality TV, midget tossing.
One other thing that draws an audience to reality TV that should not be underestimated is the opportunity to see somebody fail or do/say something stupid. People love to think they are smarter than somebody else, and reality TV is certainly an opportunity to indulge that sensation.
I have never heard of any of these shows and have no plans to pursue them. Reality shows are scripted as hell, and I wouldn't read too much into the level of stupidity you likely witnessed. They are trying to make money after all, so they make it as dramatic as possible while simulating "reality". As for the people who go on these shows, most of them are wannabe actors looking to get discovered. The bar keeps getting lower and lower. With the internet, everybody believes they can be a star. The reality shows I enjoy are around cooking and real estate, because I like to see actual contests, hard work and creativity in the case of the cooking shows, and I like to see remodeling projects. Pretty sexy, no?
We humans are pretty much "monkey see, monkey do." When young women see women succeed by appearing in high heels and bikinis, then that's what they'll prepare themselves to do.
I don't think this is post enlightenment, because the enlightenment was always an elite movement. I think this is post Christian.
In the old days people in England were expected to spend much of their free time practicing archery. I suggest moving back to that. (Firearms would be better.)
Yes, it's mystifying about the ridiculously over-represented "minorities" (Global Majority you racist!) and non-hetero couples in every single TV advert. I don't know whether it is some sort of attempted programming exercise, or whether the makers actually believe that is how the UK looks. Of course, a lot of them will be made for US audiences with just English accents dubbed on, I guess. But there wouldn't be that huge a difference in demographic make-up, possibly. And my wife watches several soaps, which I see by default,even though I have my headphones on mostly. Again, the over-representations are there, to a laughable extent. One programme has two transgender characters , and of course they all have at least one, usually two same-sex relationships. Interestingly, at the moment every one of the three soaps that I "see" has a story involving an abusive and controlling relationship where (naturally) the perpetrator is a white male. Just observations from the sofa !
The purpose of ads is not to sell products. The purpose is to sell a life style and reinforce whatever narrative is currently being used to control and demoralize the common folk.
So many wonderfully observant cultural nuggets here, but just to add that here in the US the bizarre overrepresentation of racial and sexual/gender minorities in TV ads and shows has reached absurdly epic proportions, and many times don't make any sense, in that you'll see a white couple with a vaguely non-white kid or two, or other sorts of combinations......
I have never willingly watched a so-called reality show although I have been exposed to them while visiting. I find them either utterly boring or akin to watching a Roman circus. The roar of the herd is frightening in its "abaissement du niveau mental".
Indeed. Reminds me of a very old cartoon — Bloom County? — that took a well-deserved shot at Geraldo Rivera for his reporting on the gladiator contests from the ancient Colosseum …
Tuned out for most of your post, but you hit the target re advertisements.
1. Most ads portray an unreal (to some utopian) world of unreal racist / sexist / cultural wishful fantasy.
2. Despite the ad world’s phony, lying, exaggerated worldview, ad revenue has so much power in the on-line information sphere, that the people who wield the power can surreptitiously influence, attack, scare, and disrupt enormous multi-billion platforms.
But I'd definitely go with your item 3 -- bread and circuses. 😉🙂.
And thanks for reference to McCarthy -- I'd been trying to remember the author of The Road, even the title as all I'd remembered had been some of the plot and theme:
As miserable a novel as could be, but probably one of the best reads I've ever read. For me the story reminds me of this poem, 'Hope is a thing with feathers'. E Dickinson.
Thank you for picking up on this....I didn't know it (and I suspect many will, like me, assume it was a McCarthy original). In a similar vein, many have assumed my Substack title was a borrow from Joan Didion rather that Yeats. Yeats....what a fine wordsmith he was!
Don't have a clue. Permanently turned off the TV roughly 30 years ago. Haven't had one in the house since the household broke up roughly 15 years ago. See how much angst I've been saved? You could do it to...
I'm actually re-reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death at the moment. I was astounded by how many of the early settlers in the New World were literate and had such a voracious appetite for the written word. How different from today. That said, It cheers me up no end that the girl who serves us coffee at our local espresso bar has started her own reading group. Why? Because she can turn the 'tele' off and read a book. She says it makes her think. There's hope yet.
All the Pretty Horses: “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief.”
What I find spookily disturbing are the adverts by charities on radio. You can listen to two or three charity adverts imploring you to leave a donation in your will to some worthy cause. Fine. Then immediately after an upbeat advert for a luxury cruise. Is it me? Old people are going to die this winter apparently so let's leave it all to BHF and HertiGruten tours. Ha! Ha!
What irritates me about ads by charities who claim to combat the scumbags of the world....people traffickers, sexual abusers, poachers etc etc....is that they never actually say precisely what they will do with your donation. A charity which told you how many scumbags they would cause to end up in jail would get my money but I suspect they are more likely to fund courses to 'educate' them out of being a scumbag....3 course meals included! But maybe I'm too cynical.
Your informed rants are an excellent illustration of the difference between the reality TV audiences you discuss and the clearly higher educational standard of previous generations. I see this as pure social engineering for venal purposes, both corporate financial interests and sociopolitical control mechanisms. This is directed by technocratic elites who, as Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul explained in his prescient and vital book "Voltaire's Bastards" 30 years ago, are themselves culturally illiterate, thanks to the deification of STEM culture. Just yesterday another British writer, Nina Welsch, put her finger on it when she described the phenomenon as "the nurseryfication of culture." https://thecritic.co.uk/the-nurseryfication-of-culture/
For some time now I've been saying that, while in the past in Western culture we were creating an adolescent culture (remember the "good old days" of sex appeal as the main motivator in ads and movies?), lately we've moved into an infantilized (when not nihilistic) culture. None of this, of course, is by accident. Social engineers like people who behave like infants because infants are 100% dependent on their caregivers—in this case, the State. The "pandemic" a prime example of this principle in operation.
Whereas, adolescents can be tricky to manage, since their minds are beginning to wake up and their impulses are often conflicted—thus, far less controllable than infants. Sex appeal has thus been replaced by both a parochial "let us tell you what to think" cultural messaging, combined with constant crises and shocks that cause the frontal cortex to go offline, driving the infantile into the arms of Mommy or Daddy State and its Woke catechism.
Note also the frequent use of primary colours on banners, badges and flags—something I think you originally pointed out, Graham. Primary colours are said to have strong visual appeal to children as young as kindergarten age. So it's appropriate that the level of popular entertainment be similarly lowbrow and below the belt.
Compare the average script of even a mass appeal TV series from the 1960s with today's reality TV to drive the point home. There was so much witty, intelligent dialogue in series like "The Saint" in Britain or even the comedy spy satire "Get Smart" in the US. You can see the deterioration in the decades since, especially if you compare series like "The Prisoner" or the original Star Trek, which relied heavily on Shakespearian and Greek mythological themes. After the "Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" series, even the Star Trek franchise has devolved to mere action-suspense movies in space with mostly witless or mere Woke dialogue.
I don't see reality TV and TikTok culture as innocent fun at all but as a debasement of the human intellect and spirit, and a calculated one at that. It's flushing down the toilet 2,500 years of human accomplishments in higher culture. It deserves to be ignored, even boycotted. We shouldn't give a damn if it makes us sound like old men lecturing young people. That succumbs to the false notion that people with decades of experience somehow have nothing to offer the young—another deliberately promoted lie that keeps mainstream culture infantilized.
Every single element of the media, in all its various forms, is corrupt, lying and manipulative.
I still get a daily dose of Al Jazeera and Democracy Now.
It’s your lucky millennia!
What I got out of this is that I want to see that "Redneck" show and have a cognac.
Look, PT Barnum summarized the case well enough: "No man ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” I gather that observation would obtain in other geographies. If you've ever had the misfortune to accidentally scroll your remote onto a Japanese television game show, you know what I mean. If you can figure that stuff out or take more than 10 minutes trying to figure it out, you're a better man than I am.
There is high art and low art and stuff in between. I think there has always been a market for the guilty pleasure of mindless entertainment - romance novels, B-grade science fiction movies, reality TV, midget tossing.
One other thing that draws an audience to reality TV that should not be underestimated is the opportunity to see somebody fail or do/say something stupid. People love to think they are smarter than somebody else, and reality TV is certainly an opportunity to indulge that sensation.
I have never heard of any of these shows and have no plans to pursue them. Reality shows are scripted as hell, and I wouldn't read too much into the level of stupidity you likely witnessed. They are trying to make money after all, so they make it as dramatic as possible while simulating "reality". As for the people who go on these shows, most of them are wannabe actors looking to get discovered. The bar keeps getting lower and lower. With the internet, everybody believes they can be a star. The reality shows I enjoy are around cooking and real estate, because I like to see actual contests, hard work and creativity in the case of the cooking shows, and I like to see remodeling projects. Pretty sexy, no?
We humans are pretty much "monkey see, monkey do." When young women see women succeed by appearing in high heels and bikinis, then that's what they'll prepare themselves to do.
I don't think this is post enlightenment, because the enlightenment was always an elite movement. I think this is post Christian.
In the old days people in England were expected to spend much of their free time practicing archery. I suggest moving back to that. (Firearms would be better.)
In certain parts of England and Britain as a whole it’s now mandatory.
Yes, it's mystifying about the ridiculously over-represented "minorities" (Global Majority you racist!) and non-hetero couples in every single TV advert. I don't know whether it is some sort of attempted programming exercise, or whether the makers actually believe that is how the UK looks. Of course, a lot of them will be made for US audiences with just English accents dubbed on, I guess. But there wouldn't be that huge a difference in demographic make-up, possibly. And my wife watches several soaps, which I see by default,even though I have my headphones on mostly. Again, the over-representations are there, to a laughable extent. One programme has two transgender characters , and of course they all have at least one, usually two same-sex relationships. Interestingly, at the moment every one of the three soaps that I "see" has a story involving an abusive and controlling relationship where (naturally) the perpetrator is a white male. Just observations from the sofa !
On the subject of the tv dramas that you "see" by default, I think you'd find this one an interesting read: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining.....albeit in grim kind of way!
You certainly covered the ground with that post! And the abusive-white-male trope remains intact from there to here, I see :)
The purpose of ads is not to sell products. The purpose is to sell a life style and reinforce whatever narrative is currently being used to control and demoralize the common folk.
So many wonderfully observant cultural nuggets here, but just to add that here in the US the bizarre overrepresentation of racial and sexual/gender minorities in TV ads and shows has reached absurdly epic proportions, and many times don't make any sense, in that you'll see a white couple with a vaguely non-white kid or two, or other sorts of combinations......
Thank you.
1000x yes!! It’s almost comical. Rarely do you see a family of the same color with boring heterosexual inclinations!
I have never willingly watched a so-called reality show although I have been exposed to them while visiting. I find them either utterly boring or akin to watching a Roman circus. The roar of the herd is frightening in its "abaissement du niveau mental".
Nailed it Gwyneth. The last days of Rome.
End of the First Republic in any case … 😉🙂
Indeed. Reminds me of a very old cartoon — Bloom County? — that took a well-deserved shot at Geraldo Rivera for his reporting on the gladiator contests from the ancient Colosseum …
Self-reporting.
Tuned out for most of your post, but you hit the target re advertisements.
1. Most ads portray an unreal (to some utopian) world of unreal racist / sexist / cultural wishful fantasy.
2. Despite the ad world’s phony, lying, exaggerated worldview, ad revenue has so much power in the on-line information sphere, that the people who wield the power can surreptitiously influence, attack, scare, and disrupt enormous multi-billion platforms.
👍 Reminds me of The Running Man movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(1987_film)
Or maybe Kafka's The Penal Colony.
But I'd definitely go with your item 3 -- bread and circuses. 😉🙂.
And thanks for reference to McCarthy -- I'd been trying to remember the author of The Road, even the title as all I'd remembered had been some of the plot and theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road
As miserable a novel as could be, but probably one of the best reads I've ever read. For me the story reminds me of this poem, 'Hope is a thing with feathers'. E Dickinson.
Thank you for flagging this great little poem.
Been some years since I read it, but the Wikipedia synopsis of "dystopian" seems particularly accurate if something of an understatement.
I think Yeats gets the credit for “no country for old men.”
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/sailing-byzantium/
Thank you for picking up on this....I didn't know it (and I suspect many will, like me, assume it was a McCarthy original). In a similar vein, many have assumed my Substack title was a borrow from Joan Didion rather that Yeats. Yeats....what a fine wordsmith he was!
Yeats probably borrowed it too!
Don't have a clue. Permanently turned off the TV roughly 30 years ago. Haven't had one in the house since the household broke up roughly 15 years ago. See how much angst I've been saved? You could do it to...
I threw our TV out of the window in 2022. The window was open at the time, and not regretted my decision.
Two good decisions. Opening the window first counts.
Keith Moon style?
I'm actually re-reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death at the moment. I was astounded by how many of the early settlers in the New World were literate and had such a voracious appetite for the written word. How different from today. That said, It cheers me up no end that the girl who serves us coffee at our local espresso bar has started her own reading group. Why? Because she can turn the 'tele' off and read a book. She says it makes her think. There's hope yet.
All the Pretty Horses: “The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief.”
Great quote...well spotted.
I used a search engine to look cool, knowing that I could rely on Cormac to describe our zeitgeist.
And to tie McCarthy to Gray: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/06/cormac-mccarthy-knew-literature
Exceptional article, and now I have to watch 'The Counsellor' which I'd deliberately skipped - nihilism is more appealing now.
What I find spookily disturbing are the adverts by charities on radio. You can listen to two or three charity adverts imploring you to leave a donation in your will to some worthy cause. Fine. Then immediately after an upbeat advert for a luxury cruise. Is it me? Old people are going to die this winter apparently so let's leave it all to BHF and HertiGruten tours. Ha! Ha!
What irritates me about ads by charities who claim to combat the scumbags of the world....people traffickers, sexual abusers, poachers etc etc....is that they never actually say precisely what they will do with your donation. A charity which told you how many scumbags they would cause to end up in jail would get my money but I suspect they are more likely to fund courses to 'educate' them out of being a scumbag....3 course meals included! But maybe I'm too cynical.
Just another racket Graham.