Opium for the masses!

It has been quite a while since I last turned on my television, just to get some entertainment. I live in Luxembourg, so most channels are German or French. Scripted programming is usually translated in either of those languages and the big shows from the US are shown here with a delay of at least a year. So if I want to watch any of these shows in English and without the horrendous amount of commercial intermissions I have to watch them on my computer. This just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from.
Now the thing I’d like to rant about is the lack of intelligent programming that has been around for the last decade. When I was a kid, you could turn on your TV and watch a show that had a story and usually a decent amount of entertainment value, sure we had stupid shows like “Married with Children” or “Sledge Hammer” but even these were coherent and meant to entertain; to make you laugh. There were no talk shows, no courtroom “dramas”, almost no reality TV whatsoever. It all started with “Big Brother”, when a bunch of total idiots and social outcasts were locked up in a house and watched day and night. Somehow this voyeuristic concept that would make George Orwell roll in his grave sparked an “entertainment” concept that introduced new shows on a monthly basis into the ether. We now have shows that portray trials in a “real” courtroom, camps with celebrities that are filmed 24/7, girls in bikinis that talk about their body issues (YES there really is a show like that!), etc. The new seasons of “American Idol” and its German counterpart “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” illustrate my point perfectly. The viewer is not supposed to think while watching but to gloat, and to feel Schadenfreude and later on (after the casting shows) even laugh and cry with the contestants. Three moronic judges treat other people like dirt in the name of entertainment and nobody takes issue with this. Seems we all like to laugh at the misery of others just a bit too much to care. Well I guess that’s a good thing, just think what would happen if we started to feel sorry for people that are worse off than us… We might even want to help them! OH NOES! (I know I’m taking a big leap here and a lot of you will not agree with me, but in my opinion the lack of empathy is one of our major problems at the moment. It keeps us from taking issue with poverty and war, as long as we are tucked away happily in our homes.)
The current writers guild strike might seem like a bad thing for the viewer and the networks, but let’s be honest, what better excuse could there ever be for the networks to produce more mind numbing and stupefying shows? Especially in the US where the government wants to keep its people as dumb as possible, quality TV, that might help to keep the viewers critical and interested in a wider variety of topics, is like poison. If the audience still watches TV when there are only reality shows left, then why should the networks finance extremely expensive shows like “Lost”, if they don’t need them anymore? Just keep them clapping their hands like monkeys while the newest one-week-wonders are created, or the “American Gladiators” smash their competition. Just think of the repercussions if they would watch truthful news (which there thankfully are none) and open their minds!
Thank you reality TV for helping us fulfill our full potential. Being FAT and DUMB!

War is peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength

What grinds my gears!

I’m writing this to vent and maybe also to get a general idea of what other people think, so feel free to comment.
Being a student in my last semester, I can’t help but wonder, how most people see their life, and themselves in it. In the last few years I finished a lot of different courses and all of them have one thing in common: most of the work is done with presentations. You might say: that’s a good thing; people learn how to talk in front of others, express themselves clearly and use modern media in the process. Sadly I have to say that on the receiving end, this usually is nothing but boring.
How is it, that in a room full of people who study English, most of them are unable to speak two sentences in a row without raping the English language on the level of vocabulary or grammar. All of them have had extensive studies in the field, for at least six to seven years before they even started their university studies. At this moment I should probably mention that I’m a student at Trier in Germany, so English is not the native language, but acquired through second language studies in school. So yes, to attain the level of somebody whose mother tongue is English, is very difficult. But if you have difficulty expressing yourself and don’t know the grammar of a language, why would you study it at a university? Worst of all, most of these people are planning to become teachers and TEACH our children later on. To come back to the topic of presentations, the lack of language skill is the first problem you will encounter when you are part of the audience during a group presentation. Most of the time, the person who tries to present a topic (and remember this is with the goal of TEACHING everybody in the room something) has no idea how to express him/herself in a comprehensive way. This usually ends in a stuttering, and searching for words, that makes it difficult if not impossible to follow. Second, and that is something that I had to witness again today with painful agony, is the lack of technological knowledge.
Ok I consider myself to have a knack for technology, be it a computer or a simple DVD-player, but I’m still under the impression that it doesn’t take a degree in quantum physics to work either of those two. I’ll just take today’s example to make my point: A group of three students was doing a presentation on Fritz Lang’s movie “The big Heat” and for this purpose they had planned to show several scenes during their speech. However it seemed to be utterly impossible to work the DVD-player to a point that I had to ask myself if the design of a remote control is still too difficult for a UNIVERSITY STUDENT!!!! The play, pause, stop, forward, rewind buttons have been around for over twenty years now, nobody changes them, the design is so universally standardized that you could work it even if the language aids written besides the buttons where in Japanese. Still this group did not manage to skip to a different scene without excessive rewinding, and forwarding and sometimes even restarting the whole DVD just for the fun of it. I was under the impression we were in the 21st century and technology was not new to us, but apparently some of us still cook with fire and roll a stone in front of their cave at night.
Considering that it takes at least five years to finish your studies in Germany (six years to be realistic) it is disappointing that you have to waste your time, sitting through unprepared presentations where you are supposed to learn something only to listen to people jabber on about eeeh, aaah, oooh, I can’t remember the word, what was it, where was I, etc. Leaving the room after such a session and feeling dumber than before was not what I had in mind when I signed up for my studies…