Average Joe: What A Joke!

[Susan]

>>Susan, you COULD bring in a disk of Plan 9 and give your coworkers something FUN to watch!<<

wow, if only we had a vcr :-)
One day I tried putting it on happy days, somebody walked in and said "Who put this crap on?" and switched it to springer.

I actually threw around the idea of buying a portable dvd player just so i could watch movies on my lunch break..and any other time i feel like it..lol
I have to put up with my coworkers who are not exposed to the movieworld. By that I mean i work with people who have never even seen "airplane" for cryin out loud. I need to be emersed in a work environment with more people like me

[KLOP2]

Some tv shows of reality must be real.

[KLOP2]

Some tv shows of reality must be real.

[ulthar]

KLOP2 wrote:

> Some tv shows of reality must be real.
>

Like what?? The news is not even real anymore; they pose and set up shots, edit interveiws to say what THEY want said (maybe not always, but OFTEN), etc.

Back during hurricane Isabel, there was that shot of one reporter flying off camera from the wind that everyone thought was so spectacular ... then a few days later it came out that there was a crowd of people standing across the street (including the cameraman, who was not moving) watching the whole thing with casual interest.  In short, it was a stunt.

TV is about one thing - selling advertising.  Advertising itself is generally based on falsehood (the seven techniques of adverstising happen to correspond nicely with the seven fallacies of logic), so why should the mechnanism to get you to watch the advertising not also be based on falsehood?  If they can get more people to watch some stupid show by calling it "Reality, " they will.

Fear Factor is a good example..how can you call that reality?  Who eats horse rectums, for crying out loud?  And those stunts .. they all have safety mechanisms built into them to PREVENT INJURY!!  They are Hollywood stunts, designed and supervised by stuntmen.  They even say that at the beginning of the show.  The only scary thing about doing them is trusting the safety equipment.

And Survivor is just as dumb ... anyone who has been in a hairy survival situation must look upon that crap with pure disdain.  First of all, you don't backbite and stab each other in the back in that situation ... your chances of survival increase exponentially by WORKING TOGETHER.

The fact that all of those shows follow the same format (a little supposed real action, a couple of 'aside' interviews in which sometimes really ugly things are said, 'suprises' to shake things up, etc) also helps support my thesis.  Reality is not predictable and is not so easily made to follow a mold.

Anyway, enough from my soap box .. I don't doubt that many find these shows entertaining, but I think it can hardly be argued they are what the are pretending to be.

[Flangepart]

Ulthar : You stold the verbal emissions right out of my oral cavity.
Survivor is crap!
Its a grungy form of popularity contest, nothing more.
Reality T.V. can bite my shorts.

[JohnL]

>Fear Factor is a good example..how can you call that reality? Who eats horse
>rectums, for crying out loud? And those stunts .. they all have safety mechanisms
>built into them to PREVENT INJURY!! They are Hollywood stunts, designed and
>supervised by stuntmen. They even say that at the beginning of the show. The
>only scary thing about doing them is trusting the safety equipment.

I've always considered Fear Factor to be a game show, not a "reality" show. Sure, there's a winner on Survivor and those other shows, but they drag the premise out. With only a couple exceptions, each episode of Fear Factor is self-contained and there's a winner on each one. None of the people are voted off, they're eliminated by failing the stunts.

[ulthar]

I agree... all of these shows in the Fear Factor, Survivor, The Bachelor mold(s) are more like game shows.  They are contests for financial (or other????) gain, just modernized versions of The Dating Game, Truth or Consequences (I am really dating myself), etc.

None of them are 'reality' in my opinion ... the term reality to describe ANY of these shows is akin to 'New and Improved' on my Nabisco crackers.