You are what you watch! Essay -- Media, Television Shows

Imagine a distant post-apocalyptic future in which a considerable silver box has just been excavated from the ruins of what was once Los Angeles, a box that contains portion after stack of DVDs with titles like Survivor, The Bachelor, Biggest Loser, The Swan, Real World, The Apprentice, and gl ars Kitchen. What might anthropologists conclude about our 21st century baseball club if these shows were their only glimpse into how we lived our lives? Francine Prose ponders this same dubiousness in her essay pick out Democracy aside the Island mankind TV and the Republi squeeze out Ethos, in which she asks not only what future anthropologists might deduce, but, for that matter, what contemporary TV-addicted children and adults might realize if they were to more closely seek their motivation for watching these shows (22). Salman Rushdie, in his article human beings TV A Dearth of Talent and the Death of Mortality, suggests that we need to examine reality television closely becau se it tells us things about ourselves, and even if we adoptt think it does, it ought to, a claim that suggests that if we merely brush off reality television as a fad, we might be lose something inherently valuable about our nature (16). In her essay, The Distorting Mirror of cosmos Television, Sarah Coleman suggests that reality television offers a distorted reflection, a dark spatial relation of humanity in the guise of light pastime, a consideration that asks us to see who we are in this distorted reflection of our values (19). The question then is what do we see when we see ourselves in this dime-store mirror (Reality TV 16)? Whatever the answer to this question might be, the question itself suggests that in that location is something inherently human about our fasci solid ground with r... ...way and be the winner that it is fine to betray others because winning is everything that annoying, conniving, hysterical liars are far more raise than honest, conscientious, sel fless mountain and that we are not really a nation of communities but a group of individuals fighting for ourselvesall of which suggests on a very deep level that we feel better when we watch people who we deem to be worse off than we are. The saddest lesson, however, might very strong be that we are starved for this kind of inherently cruel entertainment because our own lives seem so much duller in comparison, an observation that suggests that what we can learn from Reality TV does not necessarily only entertain to our generation, but to those that came before us and those that will followincluding these hypothetical anthropologists who are watching these shows to better understand us.