Poverty Porn

In the mindless era of consumerism coupled with an infinite growth paradigm, we are being force fed reality show tripe that perpetuates a disconnect from humanity/reality.  

Here we have a "reality" TV show that prays upon the effects of living under said paradigm.  Pass the popcorn.

Poverty Porn - Compliments of CBC

Poverty porn reality TV can highlight working class struggles

The Briefcase, Britain's Hardest Grafter slammed for exploiting people's financial struggles

Poverty porn is the best description for this. I am always a little shocked by TV...it just continues to reach new depths and move further and further away from humanity....and people are making millions from producing this.

Agreed.  They are getting quite adept at exploiting and dumbing down the masses.

I would trace one root of this back to Jenny Jones/Jerry Springer & also Judge-Judy programs. What those sort of programs offered was the chance to see dysfunctional lower class individuals from the safety of your own TV set.

So poverty deforms people's personalities and then TV show's harvest them to display as profitable freaks.

The amount of human depravity that passes as 'entertainment' is a giant red flashing light (DANGER! DANGER! Cultural Degeneracy!) to me. I have a couple of pages from an old Media Ethics course I could post up, if people really want to dig into this - but it isn't pretty....

I would to know more about this. Can up post the links up?

The webpages for my course no longer exist - so I'll transfer them to here (basically convert them from HTML to BBcode).

The 'Reality TV' part of the course was the tenth week, so at this point I'm letting my freak flag fly and speaking pretty bluntly. The first step was having everyone watch Videodrome - most people didn't understand the movie (the few who did always stood out) but it still set the right emotional tone for the next class.

So I'm posting a review of Videodrome in the -ahem!- Videodrome section (yep - I called the media review section of this forum 'Videodrome' in honor of this film). Read that and I post the course material next.

The single hardest point to make in this course was: TELEVISION EFFECTS YOU. Most people think they consume whatever media they want without any effect on their minds or personalties. This is the one attitude I kept hammering away at.

"Who cares if I watch torture-porn or Mr.Rogers, it makes no difference?"
"Really? It doesn't what what the daily diet you feed your brain with?"

Videodrome graphically illustrates its makes a difference....