{"id":17196,"date":"2012-10-04T10:42:49","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T15:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17196"},"modified":"2012-10-04T10:43:25","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T15:43:25","slug":"reality-tv-may-even-be-the-next-stage-in-the-evolution-of-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/04\/reality-tv-may-even-be-the-next-stage-in-the-evolution-of-television\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Reality TV may even be the next stage in the evolution of television&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/opinion\/2012\/10\/why-reality-tv-doesnt-suck-and-may-even-make-us-smarter\/\" target=\"_blank\">Grant McCracken<\/a> goes ultra-contrarian in this article at <em>Wired<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It\u2019s easy to assume reality TV is the place where bad TV went to hide when the rest of TV got a lot better. Like that old Wild West town where criminals congregate, reality TV is often perceived as the last, \u201cvast wasteland\u201d: uncouth, desperate, lawless.<\/p>\n<p>But while some shows seem irredeemably bad (<em>Here Comes Honey Boo Boo<\/em>, anyone?), others offer an indication of good things to come. In fact, by turning all of us into virtual anthropologists, reality TV may lead to the improvement \u2013 dare I say it \u2013 of Western civilization. Reality TV may even be the next stage in the evolution of television.<\/p>\n<p>In its early days, TV was confronted with a series of problems. It was a new medium struggling to find a place in the world. It had quality-control problems in sound and image. And it was talking to millions of American for whom English was a second language and American culture was still a mystery. TV solved these problems by relying on genre. Once you understood you were watching a \u201ccop show\u201d or a \u201cWestern,\u201d the rest was easy.<\/p>\n<p>Genre was like a cheat sheet. It flattened every difficulty: technical, intellectual, cultural, linguistic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grant McCracken goes ultra-contrarian in this article at Wired: It\u2019s easy to assume reality TV is the place where bad TV went to hide when the rest of TV got a lot better. Like that old Wild West town where criminals congregate, reality TV is often perceived as the last, \u201cvast wasteland\u201d: uncouth, desperate, lawless. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,13],"tags":[209,262,248,101],"class_list":["post-17196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-usa","tag-anthropology","tag-culture","tag-realitytv","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4tm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17196"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17198,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17196\/revisions\/17198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}