Reality Bites Back
The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV
by Jennifer Pozner
PN1992.8 .R43 P69 2010
New Arrivals, 2nd floor
With finals taking over your life and the semester coming to an end by Friday, we are coming up with ways to de-stress prepare ourselves for the holiday season. The television has always been a dependable manner frequently utilized to take a break from reality. Of course, that break from reality might be spent watching reality TV, which, as this week’s featured title shows, couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Pozner, a media critic and founder of Women in Media & News, takes aim at the television industry and doesn’t hold back. She targets reality television, unmasking the ulterior motives of financial gain and political agendas. The author primarily attacks the portrayal of gender and race, bringing up examples of the Bachelor and Temptation Island as the downfall of society. Writing in a biting and and engaging style, Pozner presents a solid case for becoming more critical of your entertainment choices.
Hey, my roommate and I watched Temptation Island in grad school. Are you telling me that stellar example of broadcast media was a waste of my time?
Well, not just media, but also taik “personal travel.” Is travel real any moar? The Tourist Track is a simulakra? Ertsatz? Faux? A fabrikaited reality thus? Simulated?
But no, you can depart from the tourist trakk anywhere everywhere in onley five minuets! (1) In Paris France I beelined for the under-explored back streets, saw into a shop where a worker was antiquing new furniture, banging a table with a chane to make it look “distressed.” He did not see me the pseudo-outsider seeing his smoak-&-mirrors act (I was dressed in my usual travel kamoflauge outfit of kakkie work-type shirt and trousers and with a nametag). So that was reely doubly unrealistically real I thought. Anyhow it was definiaiantly NOT on the agenda of the NON-existent Tour I was on!
(2) And they say exploration is defunct, that now you can’t go anywhere where nobody else has already been earlier. However, I qualified that in Barcelona Spane (also did this earlier in London England). I took a subway line out to the very last terminus stop deep into the indigenous suburbs where surely no tourists go. I then walked the several bloxx acrost Pure Suburbia to the terminus of the adjacent subway line. Now who has done that before ever–I mean as a “tourist”? So that was Transport, officialistically I was nowhere, off both the vanilla Guided-Tourist Map and the exotic Hard-Koar Explorer track, but really arrived at a custom-made Where There, eh. (Gertrude Stien said that the trouble with America is that, “there is no there there.” But she was rong?) ” I thus qualified that. I was in a New Space Role there thus…..
In Alice in Wonderland they all progress thru the chess squares to the Eighth Square “where it’s all feasting and fun.” I took French Leave and continued on to the Ninth….. AND SO, just some ways of braking the cellophain curtain, travelling outside the bane of the boring Potemkin-village Stored Fronts, past the levels of sub-reality Reality Showns simulacraed with substitute lacquer to….. well, some Where in Deed, & see, It Can Be Done… –30–