I made a 93 (out of 100) on my first response paper. I’ll take that thank you very much. My professor’s comments? (And you can’t say that I don’t get a huge ego boost from these comments)

Bishop: Keep going next time. I enjoyed it and wanted to see more. You can bring other readings in a unit into these papers to aid in development. Keep that in mind. Your approach is good here. I just ask that you write in third person only as I requested. It formalizes your tone and is customary for academic and professional writing. You have a nice style as is, you want it too [sic] read objectively. Also, conclusion – needs development [lengthening]. A good paper deserves a good conclusion. Restate thesis and wrap up by summarizing key points.

I’m certainly not arguing with him on this. I did screw up the third person at the end. I actually think I knew that before I submitted it and did that whole ‘pressed for time’ crap like I’m under right now. In any case, I see these points and can see exactly where he’s talking about. I’ll work better on the next one. If I have time, I can certainly rewrite this for a better grade and I might (again, if I have time). But, really, I wish this kind of “luck” would rub off on my Math.

Voting Reality off the Island

It is ironic that I sit here and write on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States in New York. Many, like Elizabeth Frank, felt like it was “nothing more than a silent movie played surreally in constant and slow motion” (Frank, par. 5). CBS News quoted Lawrence Wright, writer of the movie, The Siege: “People said, ‘You know, it looks like a movie,’ and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, it looks like my movie’” (Martin, Par. 9). The whole event was too horrific for many of the current generation to fathom as a reality. It is — at least for a heavy portion of blame — the current obsession with so-called reality television in the United States that promotes a false sense of reality. In doing so, reality television desensitizes people to the events happening in the world around them. It keeps them from coming to an understanding of just how real reality really is. When reality strikes back, the best many can do is compare it to their favorite thriller or horror flick. Elizabeth Prose takes us one more step from the movie theater to our living rooms.

In her essay, “Voting Democracy off the Island,” Prose makes an interesting connection between the elements of reality television and the current state of affairs in our government (226). Comparing our current administration to an episode of Survivor, she writes that it is a “travesty of democracy so painfully familiar, so much like what our political reality is actually becoming” (228). Indeed, the events of the presidential election of 2000 gave rise to a perception of reality television as the votes in Florida were counted and recounted, haggled over, and eventually ruled on by a committee. It could have been a scene straight out of Survivor with all the camps pulling for their own, the alleged backroom conspiracies, and the fight to the bitter end where there can be only one. Whether or not anyone believes that President Bush won or cheated for his election strategy, the fact remains that the perception of what the country saw on television was little more than another reality show at its best. When one’s vote is an illusion it is not a hard leap to conclude one’s face, life, and destiny are all an illusion.

Sadly, however, the only thing that so-called reality television promotes is this sense of self-illusion. Anita Creamer provides a timely illustration of this illusion making potential of television and reality shows when she talks about the twins who decide to elect for surgery “to look like Brad Pitt” (230) and the girl who wants to have the face of Pamela Anderson (229). These children are not facing the reality of their lives but escaping it. Of course, it is nothing more than they have seen over and over again on television. If you do not like the results of any particular aspect of yourself or your personal life, change it. It’s not through hard work and luck like our parents, but through a little magic of illusion, the luck of the draw, the backstabbing of a friend, neighbor, or stranger.

Prose also takes on The Bachelorette in her essay. You can have the perfect husband or wife for just a television show and some hours of punishment (223). But what happens after that? Even if we assume that Ms. Perfect and Mr. Average strike it lucky on their television show, will we see them again later on an episode of Cheaters? What kind of lesson does this teach our youth? The issue of whether or not our youth should be learning lessons from television is actually moot at this point. We know they learn from what they absorb around them in (just to name a few) movies, television shows, television commercials, and the attitudes and actions of their parents and peers. If their country’s leaders are acting like some half-tribal idiots on Survivor — I use that term “tribal” loosely — and their parents are acting like a bad rerun of Cheaters, then why should they not begin to take on certain perspectives that have more in common with reality television than otherwise might be healthy?

But unlike for Melanda in her episode of Average Joe (223), life is not scripted. We do not have the luxury of having everything around us played out after a rehearsal. We do not have the luxury of camera angles or crafty editors after a day of bloopers. But it would seem that for millions of viewers these shows offer some kind of vicarious action they might not otherwise feel or receive out of their own lives. They begin to feel as if they have the ability to live life after the manner of what they see. It would not surprise me to find any number of studies on the effects of reality television on different pathologies of human existence from divorce to murder to suicide to accidental deaths of extreme sports by the “Average Joes and Joans” of our society.

This is where we find our society desensitized through the exposure to reality television. Once the fantasy sets in, the pathology arises and “I can be like that too” becomes a mantra of the disaffected and disenchanted of our times. It might seem unfair to leave out other influences that contribute to this wholesale numbing of society. However, when we examine the elements of this medium common to the primrose policies enacted our leaders, the rare examples of justice — such as Richard Hatch’s tax evasion indictment — are just not seen as convincing impediments to the illusion of a dog-eat-dog world presented by reality shows where lies, deception, cruelty, and pettiness are the vices extolled by a few over the virtues of the many.

In another context Ms. Prose’s use of democracy as the political process of the United States might be called into question. Its use here, however, mirrors exceptionally well the devastating effects of reality television on our society when she writes that reality television is “a parody of democracy, robbed of its heart and soul, a democracy in which everyone always votes, for himself” (228).
 

Creamer, Anita. “Reality TV Meets Plastic Surgery: An Ugly Shame.” Massik, Sonia and Jack Solomon. Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Fifth Edition. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2006. 808.

Frank, Elizabeth. “New Yorker sees terror, heroism in wake of attacks.” 19 Sep 2001. Jacksonville.com. 11 Sep 2007 < http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/091901/dsr_7315140.html>.

Martin, David. “Reporting The Bin Laden Beat.” 9 Sep 2007. CBS News. 11 Sep 2007 < http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/09/sunday/main3244713.shtml>.

I have to be honest and suggest that anthropologists of the future would not likely find much congruency between these so-called reality programs as their primary sources and their secondary sources of just about anything else. Ms. Prose argues this type of programing would constitute some kind of standard reading of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and proof of a Spencer dream come true (225). As an aside, it would not be until the fifth edition of On the Origin of the Species that Darwin would pick up Spencer’s phrase — survival of the fittest — and use it, though with a certain air of a man disclaiming an annoying stepchild. Spencer’s ’survival of the fittest’ was not a proper reading of Darwin’s theory with the beginnings of its end in the 1920s and its final demise in the serious academic scene after World War II. On the contrary, we do not find Spencer’s or Darwin’s theories at work. Natural selection as defined in modern evolutionary theory is about variation in the reproductive process through heritable characters rather than a group of nobodies stuck on a island with a camera crew. None of these shows provide any evidence whatsoever of such evolutionary characteristics. Future anthropologists, then, would not come to any actual understanding of our culture or times. Indeed, they would find a confused mass of contradiction with accepted science — assuming and hoping that it had continued to advance without mere television as its guide — and they would have to dismiss it as nonsense and begin looking for more reliable evidence of our civilization.

[Yes. I obviously suck at writing about "Pop Culture"]

The source material here is for the next part. The text references are for my textbook, not the website.

Part 1 of 4

In his essay “The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life”, Mr. Matheson uses the term quotationalism, a literary style from the 1970s where references from other aspects of popular culture are necessary to understanding the context or content of a work. We find quotationalism in all aspects of life and art. In keeping with Mr. Matheson’s illustrations, we might hear someone say, “Don’t have a cow, man!” and think it is funny. But without a direct understanding of the reference to The Simpsons, we don’t have a mental or emotional comparison by which we can examine the context. A fan of the show, however, might understand that there is a sarcasm and nonchalance to the phrase that really is more of a “blow-off” of the recipient or a way to humorously defuse a tense situation. Mr. Matheson’s hyper-irony is a form of irony on steroids. Hyper-irony is a loss of the stability of authority — he calls it a “crisis of authority” (256) — in the face of progress. It is the postmodern deconstructionist’s fantasy of taking anything of worth and undercutting its meaning and purpose by turning it into a mere cog in the machine rather than an object of importance unto itself.

Part 2 of 4

Historical appropriation is the use or misuse of the past by popular culture in pursuit of illustrating the present. An example might be the use of the Woodstock era posters to promote any model of the Volkswagen Beetle past 1998 or the use of hunter-gatherer societies by neo-pagan groups for their religious sentimentality while maintaining a hairdryer in the bathroom of their brick-and-mortar home. Mr. Matheson, however, shows that not all historical appropriation is for not-so-good reasons. He mentions that at least one example of the New Urbanist movement as a direct attempt to stop erosion in many places by encouraging a “small feel” of towns from decades ago (257) with the idea — however farfetched it may be — that a simpler time would be a more ecologically sound climate of attitudes and behaviors in relation to the environment. With this small exception, Mr. Matheson’s conclusions toward historical appropriation seem to mirror those of quotationalism: that is, it is this undercutting of meaning, this “crisis of authority” (256), that has led to a lack of substance in the current trends of popular culture beyond the mere mimicking of history or of other cultural landmines. In the end, it is the irony of watching the elite drive around in what was once the transportation of choice for the anti-elite.

Part 3 of 4

Mr. Matheson, in his essay “The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life”, believes that there has been a “crisis of authority” (256) in many different disciplines from art to philosophy to science. In all his illustrations from Danto in painting to Kuhn and Feyerabend in science to Derrida in philosophy (255), he finds that there is a pervasive need to undermine the essence of the discipline itself either by removing its inherent meaning or its part in the history of that discipline’s progress or by making fun of its peers. As these disciplines retreat to an examination and rethinking — and possibly to a reconstruction — of their history rather than bowling forward to an unknown future with a possible continuation of a lack of inherent meaning, Mr. Matheson sees in this a connection with TV shows like The Simpsons (256). Since there is no inherent meaning to any cultural context, comedy shows such as The Simpsons are not actually undercutting anything at all. While this may be the ultimate irony in itself, nonetheless they are forced back into a bland route of quotationalism and flat historical appropriation. Where Mr. Matheson ends up with his examination is in questioning the moral agenda of The Simpsons (257) in an effort to get beneath the surface of this “crisis of authority”.

Part 4 of 4

Mr. Matheson’s hyper-irony is about undercutting any position at all so deeply that “it manages to undercut its [own] cynicism too” (257). Because we are no longer concerned with meaning, with knowledge, we have begun a turn to what he calls “the cult of knowingness” (258). What he means is that knowledge is no longer sufficient for superiority but it is the process of undercutting all meaning out of a sense of already knowing or not caring to know exactly what the meaning is in the first place. It is more of a “what you see is what you get” approach to anything at all. Mr. Matheson sees comedy, and The Simpsons specifically, as a prime example of this approach. Given this “crisis of authority”, The Simpsons goes so far as to undercut itself with this hyper-irony. Due to the inability of the show to actually provide any kind of moral or ethical meaning to its viewers, Mr. Matheson observes that the power of the show itself dissipates whenever the show attempts any storyline that involves family values or individual morals or any kind of ethical stance (260). In the end he find that there is a paradox involved with these kinds of TV shows. Without this ominous “crisis of authority”, the hyper-ironic sense of comedy such as in The Simpsons would fall flat.

Unlike the last part of this assignment, we can certainly see the source material here (PDF) for the next part. The text references are for my textbook, not the PDF file.

Part 1 of 4

Keyed into an insightful examination of the talk show phenomenon in relation to the growing divide between the feminine working class and their less motivated counterparts, Mr. Stark provides the backdrop for this “group therapy for the masses” (267) through the observation that “the more well-educated women left home for the workplace, and found other outlets for their interests” (266). One of the implications is that the less well-educated women who did not leave home for the workplace needed a distraction that made them feel as if they had a place in society somewhere between the laundry and the potato chips. Another implication is that these women, who had thus far relied on a kind of ‘common bond’ of womanhood — or at least a cheap tabloid of sensationalism — for their gossip or therapy with each other now had to find new outlets for their loss of the more grounded and motivated women who had moved out into the working world. Rather than spend money on the tabloids, they could just turn on the television for a slice of the imaginary life where people “thrived on the violation of taboos” (267). Rather than look at themselves for signs and avenues of improvement, they could now point a finger at those poor or devastated souls on the talk show and say, “At least it’s not me.”

Part 2 of 4

Mr. Stark believes that talk shows have a special appeal to women for several reasons. Among these reasons he includes “a feminine style of disclosure and a focus on issues considered to be of particular relevance to women” (264) and a sense of “conflict [along with] a smattering of TV religion [and] melodrama” (265). He contrasts two different talk show hosts, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, the first and the ultimate in talk show hosts for women and afternoon talk shows. With Donahue, Mr. Stark shows that he started out with a niche market of women interested in a show that was interested in them and their interests while addressing issues from which mainstream media was turning away (265). He then contrasts the approach taken by Oprah Winfrey when she brought the revelations of the confessional together with the “therapeutic sensibility” (266) of the analyst’s couch together on one show. Mr. Stark says that Oprah’s show was about “revealing problems, improving self-esteem, and receiving empathy” (266). Given Mr. Stark’s characterization of the type of woman left at home after the more educated women had gone off to work (266), this kind of psychological approach to afternoon talk shows was a formula of instant success.

Part 3 of 4

Mr. Stark seems to believe that talk shows are “oddly traditional [and appeal to] Bible Belt females who considered themselves conservative” (268). He uses as his evidence the appearance of the shows that provided lurid guests with an audience that appeared to be more conservative in their moral views (268). At the same time he says that because of “the parade of ‘trash’” (268) these women could “feel better about themselves ” (268) because they were not the ones with all the problems being aired on television. Mr. Stark’s ideas of what is conservative and what is not seems slightly skewed when understood in the context of these shows. In the March 24, 2003 edition of The Nation, John Nichols writes that by the time NBC was finally working to cancel Donahue’s show, they ” were brandishing the study that labeled Donahue ‘a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace’” (”Donahue—War Casualty”, The Nation, para. 6). It seems to be that observation of these shows is not a matter of more or less conservative but rather the “form of reassurance” was a sense of isolating deviant behavior for comparison with the average American lifestyle regardless of their conservative or liberal ideology.

Part 4 of 4

Given the events of the early nineties, it is without a doubt that Mr. Stark would suggest Bill Clinton “ran a kind of talk-show presidency” (268). With the advent of MTV’s “Rock the Vote” campaign, Clinton wisely took advantage of the effort to reach a younger, more television savvy, audience than any previous presidency campaign. The informal settings, audience participation, and what Mr. Stark calls the “‘I feel your pain’ trademark” (268) all brought together the right mix of elements to begin a presidency exemplified by infidelities, sexual scandals, publicized impeachment proceedings, and, according to a January 2001 poll by Gary Langer of ABC News, still the highest end of term presidency rating of any postwar president. Without the more familiar, down-to-earth approach to his presidency, Bill Clinton might not have been so well accepted by the American people throughout his personal and presidential ordeals. While his trials were certainly divisive of the public, his approach of an open house, talk-show style demeanor was disarming to many. As many of the regular viewers of Oprah and other shows would mistake empathy for personal connection, so Clinton would be able to draw on the sympathy of these same emotional connections rather than any newsworthy difference between substance and Republican lynch mobs. In the end, it was the talk-show conditioned sympathy that saved him with the American people.