The Dish

Patrick Brown reflects on the rise and fall of reality TV:

The shift in focus from reality to fantasy isn’t unique to The Real World.  Reality TV is no longer about reality, not the world that any of us live in, anyway (if it ever was).  Most reality TV shows are just game shows containing reality TV elements.  Survivor, Big Brother, The Biggest Loser, America’s Next Top Model, and The Bachelor are all long game shows in which the contestants play for a prize much larger than anything they might have won on The Price is Right (Indeed, on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, they compete for a spouse).

No game show has made more of The Real World’s great revelation than American Idol has:  that being real is all well and good, but what people really want is blood (metaphorically speaking).  Idol was among the first shows to take the next step of involving the audience in the fate of its cast members, upping the ante just that much in the process.  In fact, the show makes entire episodes out of the elimination ceremonies.

The only non-game show reality shows left are about people who were most decidedly unreal.  Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that we only wanted to watch people do nothing if we’d already watched them do something.  Today, the only reality shows that simply follow people around in their daily lives are celebrity-based shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Featuring Kim Kardashian, a celebrity famous for appearing in the 2000s version of a reality show, the internet sex tape).

On the other hand, shows like First48, or Hoarders or Intervention are riveting slices of reality. And Youtibe serves up more real life than television ever could.

A niche blog.

Charles Manson – in one of 125 rare photos of famous people compiled by Crack Two.

A rare glimpse of them together as the build-up to February 11 continues.

Wired checks in on Internet use in China:

The Internet is, famously, a nonstop disruption machine — overturning every business model, cultural institution, and societal norm it touches. But even by these anarchic standards, its destabilizing impact on Chinese society has been immense. The number of Internet users in the country has skyrocketed in the past 12 years from 620,000 to 338 million, making it the world’s largest and fastest-growing online population. And while China has embraced its newfound digital prowess — the national telecom company adds more than 700,000 broadband customers each month — the authoritarian government has also attempted to control it.

It has fortified its “great firewall,” selectively blocking access to Google, YouTube, and Twitter. It has deployed a special Web police force, tens of thousands strong, to investigate and shut down online political dissent. It has hired a regiment of “secret Web commentators,” who post comments in praise of the state. And in July, it began developing the Green Dam Youth Escort, censoring software that can be preinstalled in new PCs.

But as China has become wealthier and its young people more comfortable with the tools of the digital age, the Internet has emerged as an uncontrollable force. Signs of its impact are ubiquitous: in hangar-sized, 24-hour Internet clubs, where hundreds of adolescents spend hours wired to headsets in front of massive, glowing monitors; on qq.com, the labyrinthine social networking and instant messaging platform popular in China that has more than 480 million active IM accounts alone; and in the proliferation of stealth software that helps users sneak around state firewalls. Parents have always worried about the pernicious impact of youth culture, whether from comic books, rock and roll, or videogames. But in China’s rigid, hypercompetitive society, the Internet explosion represents more than a disciplinary annoyance. It is seen as an existential threat. And that helps explain why treating kids with supposed Internet addiction has become a national obsession.

Jennifer Schuessler notes a book reviewer tic:

[B]oredom — unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest — is something professional readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader.

The latest:

Elisa Gabbert is tired of poets "accustomed to being published because of who they are":

Here's what I'd like to see more of in submissions: IDEAS. Why don't poems have more ideas? So many poems I read are essentially just descriptions. So you went outside. It was beautiful. Or not. I don't care how creatively you describe it, if it didn't trigger any thoughts beyond "Hells yeah I am going to describe this," it's not a poem. It's just showing off to yourself, or as Matt Rass used to say, "masturbating to language."

Nick Carr is still fretting over the future of the written word:

Our eager embrace of a brand new verb — to text — speaks volumes. We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a much more compressed, nonlinear form. What we’ve learned about digital media is that, even as they promote the transmission of writing, they shatter writing into little, utilitarian fragments. They turn stories into snippets. They transform prose and poetry into quick, scattered bursts of text.

Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.

A reader writes:

Call me cynical, and I can't imagine I'm the first to point this out, but haven't the folks at ManCrunch done a wonderful job at advertising

their site without having to, you know, pay to advertise their site?

They created an ad that was almost certainly going to be rejected by the CBS brass. Think of the firestorm after Janet Jackson's tit popped out for a millisecond at the Super Bowl half time show in 2004. Now imagine how those same people – and more – would react two gay men making out in front of their children. It's not hard. You can practically hear Bill O'Reilly's "Memo" on it already – secular progressives, overriding the values of millions of Americans, blah, blah. In fact, I'm almost glad CBS has saved us from the inevitable Fox News/Drudge backlash, however hypocritical Drudge's protestations might be. 

As for ManCrunch, they're getting the type of publicity you get from a Super Bowl without having to fork over the $2.6 million they'd need to run that ad during the Super Bowl.

So is this a victory for common sense or equal treatment? No. Does ManCrunch win anyway? Yes. And are we all spared the usual rants from the usual ranters? 

God, let's hope so.