What's the difference between what people, or things created by people,say and what they mean? Why is that difference often so great? This blog about media,the psychology of consumer behaviour, visual communications,and the strange cultural history of advertising will investigate what things say and what they mean and what that says about the strange strange world that is us.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Worse than the Truman Show- Control TV
If you remember the Truman show, you may have felt for poor Truman when he found out his whole life was a manufactured reality show that everyone knew about except him. We cheered as he made his attempt to escape to the "real world."
But what kind of real world did he escape to?
Here we are in 2010. Welcome to ControlTV where Tristan Couvares is a willing lab rat living his crowd sourced life in full 24/7 camera view...all sponsored by Ford, Sprint and Snickers. Needless to say there is a lot of candy bar eating no matter what the audience votes on him to do. And there's a lot of voting- voting on everything from getting a haircut to who he dates and of course making him do embarrassing things.
According to Steve Smith in Media Post, "Tempting as it is to deride the premise and the level of surveillance the show imposes on this character, there is something about this entire enterprise that embodies the state of digital media in all of our lives .. aren't many people starting to use the social network online as a kind of crowd-sourced advisory and surveillance mechanism... checking in with one another, giving and asking advice...For a generation of twenty-somethings ... the social network is serving as that surrogate adviser, the always-on second opinion."
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