11th
just ranting.
I never really thought about it until just recently… but wow I haven’t been a consumer of television for almost… 6 years maybe? Past 2 years been living in Stockholm student dorm so no tv and no time, then in Malmö it was just… bleh… then before that IB + procrastinating = no tv and i think IGCSE didn’t really watch tv that much, just the news and shit.
I remember i used to watch quite of bit of tv like cartoons and other random programs. and then what happened? I guess it was a mix of no time, internet and realizing that the stuff on tv is pretty much bull. shows like opera and dr phil and the high viewer ratings that they get constantly remind me of how little faith i have in human beings. i remember being at a particularly insane party, lots of alcohol was consumed and the next day i awoke with something that my friend called “alcohol blood poisoning”. she says she’s seen it before. and it was a sunday so i had to drag my hungover ass to the hospital where since i didnt have a gunshot wound, no 2nd degree burns and no article of clothing that was the color pink, i was categorized as “no need for emergency help”.
so i wait. three old metro papers and two sudoku games later i was still not called in. there was a tv in the waiting room. it was opera. i purposely had my earphones playing music and my sight concentrated on non-opera stuff because i didnt want my time to go to absolute zero waste. then i gave up, and started watching the show. to my horror, disappointment and confirmation of my hypothesis, the opera show was major shit. it had no clear aim or direction, jumping from topic to topic. some bullshit would happen like “how to take care of a minor wound” like it’s a life threatening thing, and a doctor who looks like a worldclass pedophile answers in the most serious voice: “wash with clean water and mild soap”. ok he didnt say that. he dragged it out into 3 painful minutes and i just gave you the non shiftF7 version. a most peculiar thing i noticed is that every 2 or 3 seconds the camera pans to the audience which was 93% 35-40 year old women with a face that looked like they were witnessing the birth of brad pitt and jolie’s children, only they weren’t. how can anyone find this garbage show interesting just blows my mind.
oh and then there’s Melodifestivalen aka Eurovision aka SchzhhsLagerfestivalen. I can see why anyone under the age of 8, or under heavy influence of LSD, would find it interesting, with all the sexually confused men and bright, colorful costumes. The music is even worse than “The Voice” radio station (which has a pretty easy job of having a playlist of 11 tracks with winamp on shuffle and repeat playlist, and i have a sneaking suspicion they have two copies of pokerface on there) which i thought was impossible but now i was proven wrong. the staggering amount of swedish people that tuned in to this shit was breathtaking. last year, just to give the show the benefit of the doubt, i watched the whole finals with nathan. in the end i was the closest ive ever been to a coma and nathan ended with “if you ever start about american television being crap, all i have to say is: Eurovision.”
I dont think its as much crap television shows as much as it is crappy people, content with sucking in whatever is being burned into their retinas. people like to channel surf through double digits worth of random channels, only to end up watching nationonal geographics. not saying NG is crap, just saying people don’t know what they want, and prefer to take things as they come, instead of going and downloading interesting new shows that come out be it series, movies, documentaries, cooking shows etc.
but i think that’s slowly changing.
I think we, and by we i mean the generation that spends up to half of internet activity on youtube or other video streaming sites, will change that. we download our stuff for different reasons: faster than network tv (certainly faster than swe tv), good quality, watch whenever we want, no commercials etc. the big companies against downloading should quickly embrace it, not see it as a threat but as an opportunity. VCRs, when it was news, was considered the biggest threat to the film industry. and then they used it as a distributing medium. now they should do the same. how specifically? more viral marketing. zippo is really good at this. nearly every movie, whenever a lighter is used by a somewhat cool or popular person, it’s always a zippo. haha even wall-e is shown to be mesmerised by the flame a zippo gives off. how is it that nearly every movie where a character lights a gasoline fire, he whips out his zippo, lights it, pauses to look at the flame flicker, then throws the whole lighter into the fire and runs off. WTF? what happened to lighting a piece of paper and throwing the paper in? i bet zippo pays big dollars to movie producers to make sure the actors throw the whole zippo into the fire, making it into a “cool move”. im not saying that they are trying to make people start lighting their BBQ fires by throwing their zippos into the coals and then buying a new lighter, but im sure zippo is up to something, and they are doing a great job secretly and quietly winning the audience over into believing that zippo is the ultimate lighter.
There is big money to be made in these areas. Advertise silently! Don’t advertise during the commercial break no one watches those. If you can work it into the show, and then distribute the show free of charge over the internet, I’d say that’s a pretty successful marketing campaign.
but whatever you do, SERIOUSLY do something about the fucking “this shit is not available in your country” bullshit.
haha what a load of crap. just ranting.
