At some point in the last century or so, people stopped
measuring the existential wealth of a person by the quality of their work, but
by the power of their name; a gimmick, per say. For the past half, our media
and communications have been primarily accomplished through television and
radio, so for a long time, people were essentially forced to watch what was
played on those media. The internet has only recently been adopted, at least
for people who don’t anything about computers, and this has offered us a much
more varied choice in entertainment, news, talk shows, etc. A lot of people saw
things like YouTube and other video streaming services as the answer to the
declining quality in traditional media since it would be viewer produced
content, rather than force-fed media garbage. Wrong. What ensued and became
popular were vacuous “vlogs” and some of the dumbest things I’ve ever
personally seen. After years of complaining, the ball was in the users’ court,
and they fumbled it horribly. But why?
I have some ideas why; certainly the production value was
significantly lower than a funded project on TV or in theaters, but production
value only amounts for so much. I think the problem is that the people who grew
up in this internet generation have grown up thinking that the awful modern
television is what television is supposed to be like, so most of them have no
idea how to actually be creative, and just follow clichés and tropes from what
they’ve seen.
Among the worst channels that are extremely I’ve seen, they
include Pewdiepie, a Swedish guy who plays independent horror computer games
and narrates while people watch the game and his “scared” reactions all while
inexplicably talking in a creepy “baby voice,” and it’s wildly popular.
RayWilliamJohnson is another channel, where the guy makes
short five-minute videos in order to maximize his views-per-video to make more
money from the “content partner” program, rather than longer, high quality
videos, and he basically plays videos that most people have already seen with
obvious commentary that people have already said about the videos, and the
result is obviously pointless; I’ll give Ray some credit though, as he does
have a decent production quality, but he still just parrots what every other
similar show does, from the same videos to the same “comedic” commentating
styling.
NigaHiga, a Asian-American named Ryan Higa, is another
wildly popular video of absolutely atrocious comedy; it’s like somebody
basically read a book about how to be funny and started repeating the words
verbatim, with no comedic timing or any actual emotions involved. Just wooden
“acting” and cliché gimmicks. I could go on about this for days, but the state
of media and communications is just atrocious, and the user-generated evolution
hasn’t helped, with the only good YouTube videos being candid home videos,
extreme videos and some prank channels that are unique, but most of the
channels with commentary and opinions are just watered down crap. Television
has become obsessed with terrible “reality” shows, with about five great and
unique shows a year, at most, on the cable channels; the premium channels still
have some excellent shows, but even they are starting to go downhill, canceling
some of the best, some deservedly, some not, and replacing them with
uninteresting shows. Radio has been going down for a long time ever since the
FCC started cracking down on AM and FM and lawyers, the most uninteresting
people, began taking over the production of shows and making the hosts walk on
eggshells.
Essentially, people used to blame the media for quality of
media dropping steadily for the past 15 or so years, but the truth is that,
like most things, it’s really the fault of the people. They’re the ones who
still watch the shows and support them, and they could easily fix the problems
by just saying that they’ve had enough and they’re not just gonna let them
force-feed mediocre entertainment to the viewers, but instead, they choose to
adapt to the poor quality shows and just accept them. For this to change, and this
harkens back to my other post about the fear of criticism people have, they
need to just admit that pop culture has become exponentially dumber over the
years. No more excuses, no more pandering, just honest truth and a desire for
interesting, intelligent thought in the media. Otherwise, we’re going to end up
devolving our communication to the point that our language is equivalent to
“newspeak” from the book “1984” by George Orwell, which is essentially a
severely dumbed down and simplified form of the English language.
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