“Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore — and this is the critical point — how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.”
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
When they came up with TV & Radio (you can drop the internet in there too… but that’s another discussion) a lot of people believed these mediums would be used and serve as a way to present the “best vision of ourselves” — long way we’ve come… completely backwards. Too often what sells is the “worst vision of ourselves.”
Advertising as a model has been failing, dying, and struggling to survive in the medium that is broadcast and cable TV – and in an effort to continue to support it, networks have had to continually travel down a rabbit hole of content development geared towards creating the most “outrageous” programming in order to get a few eyeballs in front of it, to continue to support the model that is TV advertising.
As a result… well… we get this:
and this…
What we don’t get is quality, thought provoking, opinion forming, or the expression of ideals.
My opinion – Change the model, change the content, you may just change the world.
“One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of “crap.”
― Neil Postman
There is a lot of crap in the world (especially the TV world) – time to get rid of the crap.
About Chris Zilo
