Anyone not in the UK may not appreciate the context of this post, and probably anyone in 3-6 months’ time reading this will consider this old news. Which is a shame.
I’ve been meaning to write something about this issue for a while but I never get around to it; so I’ll try to post something before Jade Goody actually dies. Jade Goody (I feel apologetic to you readers just by typing the name) is someone who is quite symbolic of this decade that is soon to end. This was a decade of superficiality, of popularity on the cheap and a keen emphasis on entertainment that soon becomes outdated and expired.
I often believed that ‘reality tv’ (a redundant phrase if there were any) would end up like the film “The Running Man”, where our focus on entertainment ignored the greater social and political ills of the wider world, and further, our entertainment culminated in theour interest in the death of those that we see on our screens. The situation of Jade Goody makes me almost think that we should soon expect a TV show with Noel Edmonds presenting “Climb 4 Cash”.
I just heard earlier that OK! Magazine has published a tribute issue to Jade: before she has died! This is in very bad taste. The media circus seems to be self-perpetuating. People both deride themselves at the disgust of the spectacle of publicly dying yet we still look. We are rubbernecking in the most public way possible. We should be told that the public interest is shameful, and that audiences are subject to criticism. It is important to criticise an audience as well as the media. People are not comfortable with being challenged so directly, but what is worse is that people are not even used to such a notion. Liberal-humanist ideals of the media are slowly being eroded as mutton dressed as lamb
Antisophie
Noumenal Realm 