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More thoughts on the societal impact of the WGA strike. The first part can be found here along with an explanation of how I manage to come up with these thoughts.
I freely admit that most of this post reflects how I (and those I hang around with) watch and experience television/movies. Your mileage my vary...
The value of scripted entertainment to critical thinking. A major theme in a great deal of science fiction is the idea that the public – the average person – becomes the mindless slave to a totalitarian government. In these dystopias, the government burns all the books, kills all those who think for themselves and brainwashes all others into the "popular" belief – whatever that happens to be. From "1984" to "V for Vendetta" to "Logan's Run" to "Blake's 7" villain is always the government and the hero is (usually) one lone person who tries to destroy that government.
While I greatly enjoy these stories, I submit to you that the real problem isn't that the government, but that the average person has voluntarily given up critical thinking in return for blindly following a good sounding ideology. And it doesn't matter what the ideology is because blind belief is bad no matter what the ideology is. I find it interesting how often the cry "question everything" becomes "automatically reject everything in the status quo and accept everything that is against it".
What's my point? The first step toward blind acceptance is the abandonment of critical thinking and scripted entertainment an important tool in critical thinking.
When a person watches a scripted show – whether that scripted show that has a very obvious point (ie The West Wing) or not (is Robot Chicken) – the viewer uses critical thinking skills to evaluate the show. How well the characters are written, how realistic the plot is to them, how well defined the options are, how integrated the resolution is – all of these things play into how well received the "theme/point" of the story is. Even if the viewer doesn't agree with the theme, the fact that it is laid out in scripted form allows for them to analyze the story and critically think about it.
"Reality" television (be it competition or talk show) doesn't allow that. Nor do documentary/news shows. Those shows either abandon any pretense of social importance or become "theme papers" – opportunities to present and support a specific conclusion. While the creators of these shows may have thought critically about the subject the viewers are not required to, they are just required to accept everything they saw as complete and total truth.
In writing Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury says that it was a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts". While I think that's a very broad statement, and one that Bradbury himself disproved with his landmarks scripts in Star Trek, I think it's very true of most non-scripted television. As entertaining and diverting as "The Amazing Race" or "Project Runway" or "The Iron Chef" can be, they do not encourage critical thinking.
It takes a script to engage the mind fully. It takes characters and plot and settings to draw the viewers into a story and to get them to think about the realities around them by presenting different versions of those realities in fiction. It takes the courage of a writer to allow the viewers to come to their own conclusions about what is right or wrong in the story rather than tell the views what to think about something.
And yes, I'm fully aware that television isn't seen as a beacon of intellectual thought. And I’m not saying that our future philosophers will all come from a background of media entertainment only. If we, as a society, are becoming so lazy that we don't want to think anymore – that we will be happy to sit back and let others tell us what is or isn't wrong with our world or – then we truly are heading toward a dystopic society.
Is that a big thing to lay at the feet of a writer's strike? Absolutely. I know that the writer's strike isn't about critical thinking or the future of free society. I do think, however, it is an important indicator of what our society wants. The networks are counting on the viewing audience not to care about scripts. They believe that the manufactured conflict and melodrama of “reality” shows and the sensationalism of Life!and!Death!News will keep us tuned in. They believe that we are exactly like the audiences in shows like “Max Headroom” and “The Running Man”, unthinking drones waiting to be entertained.
I freely admit that most of this post reflects how I (and those I hang around with) watch and experience television/movies. Your mileage my vary...
The value of scripted entertainment to critical thinking. A major theme in a great deal of science fiction is the idea that the public – the average person – becomes the mindless slave to a totalitarian government. In these dystopias, the government burns all the books, kills all those who think for themselves and brainwashes all others into the "popular" belief – whatever that happens to be. From "1984" to "V for Vendetta" to "Logan's Run" to "Blake's 7" villain is always the government and the hero is (usually) one lone person who tries to destroy that government.
While I greatly enjoy these stories, I submit to you that the real problem isn't that the government, but that the average person has voluntarily given up critical thinking in return for blindly following a good sounding ideology. And it doesn't matter what the ideology is because blind belief is bad no matter what the ideology is. I find it interesting how often the cry "question everything" becomes "automatically reject everything in the status quo and accept everything that is against it".
What's my point? The first step toward blind acceptance is the abandonment of critical thinking and scripted entertainment an important tool in critical thinking.
When a person watches a scripted show – whether that scripted show that has a very obvious point (ie The West Wing) or not (is Robot Chicken) – the viewer uses critical thinking skills to evaluate the show. How well the characters are written, how realistic the plot is to them, how well defined the options are, how integrated the resolution is – all of these things play into how well received the "theme/point" of the story is. Even if the viewer doesn't agree with the theme, the fact that it is laid out in scripted form allows for them to analyze the story and critically think about it.
"Reality" television (be it competition or talk show) doesn't allow that. Nor do documentary/news shows. Those shows either abandon any pretense of social importance or become "theme papers" – opportunities to present and support a specific conclusion. While the creators of these shows may have thought critically about the subject the viewers are not required to, they are just required to accept everything they saw as complete and total truth.
In writing Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury says that it was a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts". While I think that's a very broad statement, and one that Bradbury himself disproved with his landmarks scripts in Star Trek, I think it's very true of most non-scripted television. As entertaining and diverting as "The Amazing Race" or "Project Runway" or "The Iron Chef" can be, they do not encourage critical thinking.
It takes a script to engage the mind fully. It takes characters and plot and settings to draw the viewers into a story and to get them to think about the realities around them by presenting different versions of those realities in fiction. It takes the courage of a writer to allow the viewers to come to their own conclusions about what is right or wrong in the story rather than tell the views what to think about something.
And yes, I'm fully aware that television isn't seen as a beacon of intellectual thought. And I’m not saying that our future philosophers will all come from a background of media entertainment only. If we, as a society, are becoming so lazy that we don't want to think anymore – that we will be happy to sit back and let others tell us what is or isn't wrong with our world or – then we truly are heading toward a dystopic society.
Is that a big thing to lay at the feet of a writer's strike? Absolutely. I know that the writer's strike isn't about critical thinking or the future of free society. I do think, however, it is an important indicator of what our society wants. The networks are counting on the viewing audience not to care about scripts. They believe that the manufactured conflict and melodrama of “reality” shows and the sensationalism of Life!and!Death!News will keep us tuned in. They believe that we are exactly like the audiences in shows like “Max Headroom” and “The Running Man”, unthinking drones waiting to be entertained.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-18 02:37 am (UTC)From:Ever since the early 80s government and big business have been slowly eating away at all the labor laws blue collar union workers have fought so hard to get. Unions are having to settle for what they can get, and not what they want.
Hopefully going after WRITERS wasn't the best move, when you have thousands of people who can write, wright well, and explain THEIR side better then some corporate PR schmuck
no subject
Date: 2007-11-18 11:08 pm (UTC)From:We did have a much larger pool of scripted shows this fall than in the past couple of years, and I think that's because of network trend analysis.
But being large corporate entities, they must bluff their way through it and point fingers at their victims, because that is the current corporate model for the industry. And that's why it's likely to be a long strike. I sincerely hope the WGA does not have to give in to bullying.