A female Swedish journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius wrote in a chronicle yesterday about humiliation and mobbing programmes on TV, programmes that are very popular today. These programmes (or their critics?) had been up in a debate programme on Swedish TV recently.
The basic idea and conclusion from the programme leader, Janne Josefsson, was that people criticizing those programmes also allege that people watching them are stupid. These programmes have many viewers and all people can't be wrong.
In a way Josefsson puts himself in a loyalty situation with the ones who watch those programmes and what he did was stirring people up against the snobbish critics she thinks.
Boëthius writes that she has seen those programmes at least once, but has had to tie herself up to her TV-sofa, and the watching was a prolonged torture. I agree with her, I have felt tormented when I have been forced to see them, when I for instance have been visitor in other peoples’ houses and they have watched them.
She quotes a Spanish author who said something in the style:
“Maybe you aren’t only guilty to what you are doing, but also to what you are listening to, what you see and read.”
But maybe one needs to see to be able to judge and condemn?
Exactly so, Boëthius writes, we live in a viewership’s dictatorship; each programme with a lot of watchers is per definition “good”, just because it gets a lot of viewers. In what way, one can’t help wondering? she writes. Yes, they are good because they get a lot of viewers.
But this logic doesn’t hold, she thinks, and comes to think of the device “Hundred millions flies can’t be wrong. Shit tastes well!”
I am perfectly convinced that a lot of intelligent people are watching idiotic programmes and that it’s not possible drawing equal signs between “watching shit-programmes” and being “unintelligent” she writes.
The spirit of the time allows those programmes, so people are watching programmes where people in the purpose of entertainment are humiliating themselves and/or bullying each other.
Similar spirit of times have occurred during history, where millions of people watched and enjoyed things we regard as horrible and worth condemning: public executions, the Nazi mass meetings, lynching etc.
Were all those spectators, who let themselves be drawn with and entertained, stupid?
Are the Swedes watching those programmes some day going to regret that they “made themselves guilty of” watching humiliation-TV? Maybe they will realize that those programmes are a sort of propaganda for a loathsome outlook on man?
In those times civil courage is demanded, from for example people like Josefsson, she thinks. Either you can put yourself on the side of the viewers by exhibiting the critics of the misery as “snobs”, by this legitimizing even more programmes of this type, or by standing up and saying that this is humiliating and dangerous for us all; producers as well as viewers.
I am totally sure that if one decided to send an American execution with poison directly on TV one would get more viewers than any previous programme before she writes. Does this mean that this is a “good” programme?
According to the logic of Josefsson the answer is “yes”. Because a billion people or something like that would choose watching, the ones criticizing the programme are despisers of man, according to the Josefsson vocabulary.
The spirit of the time is a devastating weapon.
How big the numbers of watchers even are the programme can be totally objectionable she means.
Yes, I can, she asserts. Consenting to letting oneself be entertained with humiliation, bullying and expelling, is to humiliate oneself, and maybe that’s the meaning as a matter of fact?
“We are all assholes!”
the producers are chuckling.
But we aren’t she maintains. Thinking independently, walking against the spirit of the time is one of the greatest gifts we have gotten.
It’s a question of daring to take possession of this gift and ability she concludes.
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