Turn off Reality TV? Turn off the whole damned thing!
Morgan Boyco, Special to The Peak

'Sit up and change the channel...turn away from one episode of your favourite reality show... boycott reality TV' (Reality check for TV watchers, Editor's Voice, Oct. 29). Fuck that. It's time to throw your damn TV off the top floor balcony.

YuWei Gao laments the "two full seasons" of reality TV she "had to endure" and how insulting to our morals these shows are that we "have" to watch them? Have to? I wholeheartedly agree that it's time to turn away from our TVs for a while and do something else. But the fact is that turning away from your TV for a while and even doing nothing is more productive because many of the ills of contemporary society can be traced to our chronic media addiction. True, you won't die from missing one of your favourite reality shows but watching too many is killing you.

Our sense of the outside world comes from tubes and warm electronic boxes, filtered through the agendas of corporate advertisers. Driven by trillions of dollars, their intention is to homogenise every society's mental space to pave the way for corporate infiltration and consumer culture around the world. Reality shows may have created a 'subculture,' however, more dangerously, television, video games, commercial radio, billboards, and in-school advertising have created reality itself. These mediums manufacture our culture; they dictate our wants and needs, our relationships, imagination, and knowledge of the world.

The violence and ultra-hype that is so pervasive in the media is damaging our minds and bodies and killing our communities. The consumer epidemic is a direct and deadly side effect of the media addiction. Massive over-consumption in the new McWorld is causing pandemic obesity (an often-fatal disease) and forcing millions to spend billions on shit they don't need. We buy overpriced trash made by twelve-year-old kids in Asia to be cool because the ad between Survivor says it's cool. We're perpetuating an unsustainable economy that poisons the environment in which we must live.

Our minds are constantly being bombarded with information that is useless, biased, and often completely false and dangerous.

Mainstream news media, our primary source of information about the outside world is controlled by a few Western corporations (see AOL-Time-Warner) whose primary motive is profit and cultural homogenisation. Television is killing our sense of community. North America is losing its social capital and idly observing the disintegration of its civil society.

Why try to understand your own world when CNN tells you all you need to know? Why go into the harsh real world to organise, communicate, laugh, have sex, play, live when you can watch the hotties on Friends do it for you?

Next time you bask in the warm blue glow of your 'best friend,' ask yourself what it is really trying to do to you. Entertain? Make you cool? Inform? Manipulate? Brainwash? The new culture of TV addicts and super-consumers is fat, lazy, and stupid. That's what is screwing up our world, our environment, and our minds.

Lately, they've been trying to tell me that "there's a little McDonald's in everyone." Fuck that! Fuck you, McDonald's! I won't be part of it. I don't eat that shit and you are not part of me.

I'm taking my mind back. You can too. All you have to do is toss the TV or at least remember that it's not your friend.

And next time someone tells you how 'unfashionable' or 'pathetic' you are just because you don't know the latest about Survivor tell them to fuck off or just quietly smile and pity the fool.

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