Like the majority of my fellow Americans, there are times when I like to turn off my thinking cap, lay on the couch, remote in tow, and veg out.
In colloquial terms, the “couch potato” has become a celebrated mainstay of our culture, universally accepted as a means to bombard our synapses with useless information overkill.
There is nothing wrong with a little entertainment to help us zone out and forget about the tedium of daily life; but it’s a necessity that has been transformed by the pervasive presence of television.
Unfortunately, that’s where it ends. The ubiquity of television has reached such heinous levels of brain waste that I can’t help but cringe every time I flip through the TV guide.
Take MTV, for example. There is not, to my knowledge, one program on the station that isn’t reality TV. Most of the shows on the network promote shameless acts in varying degrees of raunchiness and vanity.
For instance, there’s Paris Hilton’s show, “My New BFF,” where contestants undergo acts of humiliation at their own expense in order to spend an outing with the most undeserving celebrity in the world.
It was bad enough when she was on “The Simple Life,” but this show takes it a step further and espouses her prissy mannerisms as excusable, because, well, she’s Paris Hilton.
Then there are “My Super Sweet 16,” “Parental Control,” “Daddy’s Girls,” “The Hills” and a lot more that I’m missing, all of which either laud the privileged for being obnoxious or kill brain cells with horrible one-liners.
It’s not hard to sum up MTV’s lineup anymore: trash TV without music.
Or, 97 percent trash TV and 3 percent bad pop music on heavy rotation.
But my main gripe with MTV is that I have seen more explicit drug usage on their shows than anywhere else, yet Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, is being investigated for his “bong” photograph while these people face no legal consequences for broadcasting their illegal habits to the country.
Of course, people nowadays don’t need much to be entertained. We live in a world of American Idols and Biggest Losers. We take pleasure in watching other’s struggles, abasement and pain in an almost sadistic culture shift where everything in one’s personal life is suddenly thrown under the magnifying glass for the world to see.
In today’s society, we swap wives, and every anomaly is granted a show on TLC or any standard network. If you give birth to five or more children at once, you need not worry about finances, because some TV executive will pitch you a show before your babies even leave the hospital. Of course, a little dose of reality is all-right, but it has imploded into a phenomenon I have failed to understand for the past couple years.
Even Disney has jumped on the shoddy entertainment bandwagon. I don’t know if I can ever forgive one of the most enduring industry icons for the inception of “Hannah Montana.”
I worry about where this is all headed, and what our choices in TV say about us as a whole in society. Obviously, people are watching these shows and taking from them whichever “values” they apparently uphold.
As for myself, call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days when music television meant music, flaunting what you’ve got didn’t mean filming your daily life for all the world to see and becoming famous didn’t require a vote.
Alana is taking a cue from the Dead Kennedys and thinks MTV should get off the air. If you agree or disagree, reach her at alana.arbuthnot@asu.edu.
