Americas Dumbing Down Via Talent Shows...

[rsmith6621]

Last edited Fri May 25, 2012, 01:14 AM - Edit history (1)

So another national talent show has debut on ABC TV tonight. Just what we need another copycat talent show.

You know if the USA would spend as much time with some issue related TV maybe we might have better educated people who can at least formulate a cognitive thought process instead of what they hear on FoxNoise.

Let work on lifting the whole country up and not just a select few who have been pre-selected based on a model image...you know like some see MITT.

[Systematic Chaos]

1. Calling all proofreaders....

[pnwest]

8. lol! a perfect irony, isn't it?

[MrSlayer]

2. Ow! My balls! is now a reality.

http://m.tmz.com/article_head.ftl?id=http://www.tmz.com/2012/05/22/americas-got-talent-star-zac-gordon-horse-smashed-nuts/#

We aren't headed to Idiocracy, we're already there.

[exboyfil]

3. It is getting harder to connect in society as a whole

I keep hearing these names at work and since I don't watch television - I am clueless.

[Populist_Prole]

5. Same exact thing here.

I was never anywhere near the leading edge of the pop-culture thing, but today sometimes I feel like the only non-philistine in a world of mouth breather, raving idiots. I mean, it's a total disconnect. Some of these people are my friends and co-workers and it's everything I can do not to openly sneer at them.

[Go Vols]

4. "reality"

shows are far from such.I dont watch.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

7. I've never been able to sit through one

Is Survivor a reality show? I've never watched even one minute of that. Well, there was only one reality show episode I watched all the way through because I found the concept funny. It was called My Bare Lady and it involved the idea of having a group of porno actresses compete for the serious acting role of Shakespeare's Juliette in a real stage play in England. The fun came from seeing the looks of despair on the face of their haughty acting coach as the porno actresses tried to read their lines as well as the infighting between the ladies for the role.

[RZM]

17. I hope to god you aren't making that up

Because that sounds like a seriously funny concept for a show.

I can only imagine the readings.

[RZM]

6. Talent shows are massively popular all over the world. So singling out America makes no sense here

Just about everybody has their own version of 'American Idol,' which was not an American invention, btw. The show was based on a UK show called 'Pop Idol,' which debuted 8 moths before the American version.

Variations on 'Idol,' '(Insert country)'s Got Talent' and 'Dancing with the Stars' are massively popular all over the world. And 'Big Brother' is another worldwide phenomenon - it first aired in the Netherlands.

Same thing for scripted shows. 'The Office' is all over the place. And I've personally seen Russian versions of 'Who's the Boss' and 'Ugly Betty' (the latter actually debuted in Russia several years before the US version and the original template was a Colombian show).

[Ron Obvious]

12. They're cheap...

They're cheap to make and therefore massively profitable. Good shows require good writers and far higher production values. Also, older, more well-educated audiences are less interesting to advertisers. Whenever I happen to watch any TV at a friend's house, say, I realise I haven't been the target audience for a long time.

But this is one of the flaws in the theory of the magic hand of the free market : it doesn't reward the best products; it rewards the most profitable.

[RZM]

14. Part of it is of course their production value. But I think the shows are genuinely popular

Because people like talent competitions. It's not like they were invented for TV, after all. They are very common in regular life as well.

It's funny you brought up the older, educated demographic, because my father will turn 70 this year and has a PhD . . . and he's by far the strongest devotee of these talent shows that I know. He absolutely loves them and even spams the American Idol system by voting for his favorite contestants over and over and over. He sometimes dedicates his mass emails to family and friends to nerdy analysis of these shows and why the results shake out the way that they do. If you want to know why certain types of people do well on Dancing with the Stars, he's your guy

A few days ago I went to bed early and he called me and woke me up. When he realized I was sleeping he said: 'Ok, I'll call you tomorrow. The evening should be fine because none of our talent competition shows are on.'

I don't watch any of these shows myself. But I can understand why they are so popular.

[Ron Obvious]

30. Well, I confess to speculating...

I think your father might not be typical, but I confess it's just speculation on my part

I deeply loathe talent competitions. They literally make me cringe. I suspect it may have been that watching the dreadful Eurovision Song Contest in my formative years has given me an inoculative effect. Watching the acts from the smaller countries finish bottom with nil points, despite being no less crap than the winners and seeing their sad faces might have engaged my empathy. I might be giving myself too much credit, of course.

After your story about your father, I just had another thought about why advertisers like talent competitions. Because of the live voting, people would be much more likely to watch these shows live rather than record them and skip the ads.

[RZM]

31. He probably isn't typical in that regard

Though I don't know. I'm sure the ratings for these shows are available online and broken down by demographic group.. He's probably not typical, but I'd guess these shows do drawn in a decent senior audience. But that's just a guess.

And you're probably right about the live thing. That's probably attractive as well and another reason why season finales of other reality shows are often live.

[Art_from_Ark]

28. They have some pretty stu-u-u-u-u-u-pid shows here in Japan

As the "defendant" in a Monty Python sketch once remarked, "It's not the high-brow bleedin' plays that pull in the viewers, you know".

[DeSwiss]

9. K&R

Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through, simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America's heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics ... politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and "freedom of choice" within the hologram. America's citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state's culture producing machinery.

We no longer have a country -- just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. Sure there is flesh within the machine, but its animating force is a viral concept, a meme run amok. Free market capitalism. We got to move them refrigerators, got to sell them color teevees. Meanwhile the culture generating industry spins our mythology like cotton candy. We all need it to survive, Hollywood myths, imperial myths, melting pot myths, the saluting dick male myths. They keep the machine running. And when the machine is running correctly, it smoothes its own way by terrifying uncooperative people into submission in prisons and torture rooms, where we do not have to look at the corpses on ice and the naked hooded bodies handcuffed to the bars. We are innocent as long as we keep our eyes taped shut. And only with our eyes shut can we keep seeing the hologram. And with duct tape over our mouths, we can recite its slogans with one hand over our heart with the other one resting on the trigger.

The average American spends about one third of his or her waking life watching television. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television creates our reality, regulates our national perceptions and our interior hallucinations of who we Americans are (the best and only important tribe on the planet.) It schedules our cultural illusions of choice, displays pre-selected candidates in our elections, or types of consumer goods. It regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons, which are now governed by the electrons of the illusion. We live within a media generated belief system that functions as the operating instructions for society. Anything outside of its parameters represents fear and psychological freefall to the faceless legions within it.

Our civilization, our culture, in as much as it can be said to exist in any cohesive way, is based upon two things, television and petroleum. Whether you are a custodian or the President, your world depends upon an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil. As in all produced illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what passes for reality, and real people performing for television. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, grappling over the feeding tube on Terri Schiavo; real actors portray non-actors in "reality shows." Michael Jackson shows up for court in pajamas and Jeff Weise shows up for class with a gun. The demand for "newsmakers" is relentless as the empire’s corporate cultural machinery weaves the warp of consumer illusions that make up our notion of individualism, and the weft of democratic mythology that constitutes our political system. This is by no means a free country and given the intense luminosity of the hologram, we cannot even see freedom from here, and probably would not recognize it if we could. Moreover though, we cannot tear our eyes away from the great flickering glow of the hologram.

As my late friend Timothy Leary put it, "An enormous industry, similar to the national projects of pyramid-building in Egypt, cathedral-building in medieval Europe, and prison-camp building in Stalinist Russia has emerged in America -- the production of political martyrs, fallen heroes and concept outlaws. ... The essence of 'news' is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats." And like clockwork, there is the nightly ritual bloodletting through televised wars and domestic murders, with detective Lenny Briscoe finding the corpses at seven, eight and eleven PM weekdays.

Joe Bageant ~ ''The Simulacran Republic''
December 24, 2005

[cilla4progress]

10. Wow. Baegeant.

RIP. Thanks.

[DeSwiss]

11. De nada.

[hifiguy]

13. Gads, I miss Joe. His was the clearest, most insightful

writing I have read in decades.

[DeSwiss]

20. The good ones always go first. n/t

[RZM]

15. Did you see my post above? These shows are very popular worldwide.

Their popularity here says nothing at all about America.

[DeSwiss]

22. That these inanities are a worldwide phenomenon....

...only speaks to the power of the Plutocracy's ability to dumb-down on a global scale.

We sit, still-faced with glassy eyes watching while "our troops" murder babies and their mothers from remote control bunkers -- in our name. And in the next moment we're arguing online with someone we never met about who will win the Super Bowl.

The so-called ''popularity'' of this tripe simply exposes the fact that the cancer has metastasized. A diagnosis of the severity in the spread of disease. People the world over are bombarded with teevee bullshit one-third of the day, each day, every day. They couldn't tear their eyes away from the glow if they wanted to. Even if their lives depended upon it. Which they're too entranced to realize, that it does.

If after 300,000+ years the best homo sapiens sapiens can do -- and with all that we've learned and accomplished, if we can't create a fairer, more just society -- and instead portray ourselves (for our amusement) eating worms, bugs and snakes on deserted islands, or showcasing the addicted behaviors of people who loves to risk melanoma in order to achieve the perfect tan, then I would suggest that we will deserve whatever misfortune comes our way.

- I'm sorry, but life is simply too precious a gift to waste in such a way........

[RZM]

24. Sorry. But that's a complete load of you-know-what

At least in regards to talent shows. Competitive entertainment has been with us from the very beginning. It's not a coincidence that the Olympic Games are, you know, over 2,000 years old

You probably know that there were major riots in Constantinople in the 6th century over . . . chariot races. People love this shit. You can bemoan it all you like, but people love it anyway. It's in our nature. You might as well argue that it's sad that people engage in violence or like having sex. We're apes. It's what we do.

BTW, the devotion to the Super Bowl here is NOTHING compared to the lengths people go to over soccer in the rest of the world. People die because of it.

[DeSwiss]

27. To each his own. n/t

[RZM]

21. That was a fast delete

I wonder what it said

[DeSwiss]

23. Nothing I wouldn't repeat....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=726295

It just got posted in the wrong spot.

[RZM]

25. Ah. Ok. Makes sense n/t

[spanone]

16. seems people like cotton candy

[madamesilverspurs]

18. Talent shows are fine. But.

I remember the Ted Mack amateur hour way back when, and Arthur Godfrey used to do something similar, I think. That said, their constestants weren't usually the subject under endless, breathless discussion on newscasts. Entertainment was entertainment, news was news. My, how times have changed.

In the months following 9-11 there was some reluctance on the part of producers to invest in the costly processes of developing shows that might get pre-empted by another terror event; that prudence was understandable, but the gap created was readily filled, it seems, by those who saw an opportunity for easier profit from less creative endeavor. Survivor and American Idol spawned knock-offs. Then came other "reality" shows, with remarkable clonings of pawn shops and storage auctions, often supplanting programming that had some measure of instructive value. Parking? Towing? And there's one show that's likely to give historians and archaeologists heart failure as the crew rips up the countryside in search of artifacts to sell; that one, especially, earns a boo-hiss on the old applause meter.

-

[Amster Dan]

26. "Reality TV' is an Oxymoron

And I do mean moron.

[flobee1]

29. These shows are nothing but a half to hour long commercial

all the judges have their logo cups sitting in front of them, the contestants are making commercials even before the season has ended-nothing but a big advertisement disguised as entertainment.
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