Reality and Digital Television

Reality Television has negatively changed the ways we understand human communication because in many reality television shows, the people involved rarely communicate and when they do, it’s never communicating in a positive way. Most of the time, everyone is yelling at or trying to bring each other down with foul words and tapping into one another’s insecurities. Reality Television has normalized a lack of communication as well as a lack of respect for each other because as stated in “The Future of T.V.: Digital, Traditional And Something In Between,” “it’s all content. It’s just story. The audience has spoken. They want stories. They’re dying for them.” Producers of Reality Television only focus on getting the content out at a fast pace as well as creating what they categorize as entertainment, but it’s only drama. Most Reality Television shows involve drama with people continuously arguing, getting into physical fights, or putting their lives, relationships, and reputations in danger to do tasks in order to earn money. Reality Television is so successful because we continue to support these toxic representations of how we should behave and communicate with one another. For some of us, it transfers over into our everyday lives where we find ourselves getting into unnecessary arguments or fights and finding it normal to disrespect and talk down on someone’s name because we’ve seen it done on television. The unnecessary drama and attention we receive from acting out as a result of becoming hooked to these reality television shows is what we crave. Hoping that digital television will somehow completely take over reality or traditional television is something good to hope for, but it most likely will never happen. However, the future of traditional television is not looking bright considering that according to the article “The Messy, Confusing Future of Tv? It’s Here,” “last quarter, nearly a million Americans dropped their pay-TV subscriptions, (Netflix added roughly that many new subscribers in the United States in the same time.) Young people, a group particularly coveted by advertisers, are moving away from TV especially quickly. The amount of time people under 35 spend watching traditional TV has been cut in half since 2010.” The youth in today’s society would rather subscribe to sites such as Netflix and Hulu instead of traditional television because they are more in control of what they watch, how they watch it, and when they choose to watch it. With traditional television, you have to watch whatever movie or show that was playing on the channels, but with digital television, you can just type in a movie or television show you’re interested in and get access to watch it. On the other hand, digital television is becoming very overwhelming because of the numerous streaming sites being created everyday which is adding more pressure and confusion on people trying to make a decision on which site to subscribe to, or whether the site they chose years ago is still what they want compared to the latest streaming sites being released. Traditional television will most likely never disappear, but digital television is definitely creating competition against it by beginning to take many of it’s consumers and profits earned.

1 comments

  1. Very true account. I will show an example of the fighting that is going on in reality TV in class as well.

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