Monday, May 2, 2011

Day 20 - The Network and "Appearing on TV means existing?"

I watched for the first time "The Network" by Sidney Lumet, which I totally loved and made me think a lot. I'm not a TV lover at all. I watch some TV series online and use the TV set just for DVDs, that's it.
When I was watching the movie I admired how it showed how important it is to appear somewhere to actually being considered as existing or successful.
There's the extreme political commando that agrees on having own shows on TV and the manager (great caracter btw) deciding to end a program in an "original" way (I won't spoil the movie, no worries :).
The movie is obviously exagerated, but it's truly representing what happens in TV everyday. Showing off tragedies, useless shows, boobs everywhere anything to capture audience and sell it to advertisers at a premium price.
I don't have anything against any medium, but I guess that most of the people watching TV are not aware of this and therefore they are passively believing that the reality shown on TV is real life. My bet is that it is not.
What do you think?

Here's the trailer of the movie, in case you haven't seen it before (like me! :)

4 comments:

  1. Liked the movie!

    I guess the big shift we're leaving as more and more people goes from the TV to digital content is related to content selection, from what freezes us (and the traditional networks consider a success as they got our eyes captured) to what makes us react (not only capturing our eyes but our hands and brain).

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  2. Yeah, first you go from Passive to Active and then to interactive. I would say, welcome interactive era ;)

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  3. appreciated your suggestion: this is how we discover content :)

    ...from passive to voting to participating... something like this http://bit.ly/iSAWdr

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  4. That's exactly it! Nice chart! Thanks for sharing.

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