Archives for posts with tag: Real Life

Reality is Not Real

December 18, 2019 //
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I’ve always detested the so-called Reality TV genre. Really can’t abide it at all. It doesn’t matter what topic: celebrities, regular folks, dancing, surviving, loving, hating, watching reality TV. I find it awful and depressing.

I think this is because reality is not real. At least, reality television isn’t real. It’s an edited down, souped up, hammed up, extreme version of real life. All the good bits, the dramatic bits, put together for our entertainment. Packaged up as real, but not really real at all; simply entertainment, of a type.

It doesn’t convey real life, and I don’t think it was ever meant to. Real life is running all the time, and has always run, and you simply can’t convey the huge periods periods of not much happening, periods of normalcy, not even with vlogging. Normalcy is not viewable as entertainment, not even if you attempted some Truman Show-type of constant coverage. If you did you’d get the view the camera gives you, not your view, the individual’s.

When I was much younger, well before reality TV emerged, I sometimes day-dreamed about what it would be like televising me driving on a long journey, exploring my musings and regaling myself and my unseen audience with my wit. How would that ever be interesting to others, even if you had the most charismatic person in the world, unless you presented the highlights?

You can’t ever replicate the individual’s perspective of the reality they see and experience. Maybe there’s a different format yet to be explored which will do justice to real life. But probably not.

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Categories Communication, General

I Died

September 30, 2016 //
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These days, you hear kids say ‘I died’ all the time. Not as in ‘I died laughing,’ like my generation would have said, but as in ‘oops, I died,’ from losing their virtual life in a video game or anything that simulates real life.

It got me thinking about how seldom you would have heard kids saying that before video games like Pac Man, Space Invaders and the like. After all, to actually die – well, it’s a pretty horrendous concept for those of us who feel we haven’t accomplished much yet.

What a poor memory I had, and what a classic example of falling into the trap of judging everything from today’s perspective.

Of course, kids have been role-playing and more specifically playing war games since the human race has had toys, and they must have killed other soldiers or been killed themselves on many occasions. It’s all part of growing up.

Maybe it was mostly boys that played war games. I don’t know or remember, but it still sounds odd to me when I hear my daughter say ‘oops, I died.’

I recount this story not for its own intrinsic value but as a reminder to you and me that we often make decisions based on our own current context, when that can be the wrong context. It pays to think out of the box, and in the box of the person we’re trying to influence.

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Categories Customers, Language, Marketing