Next or The Real Housewives?

In my previous blog I talked about how we don't know what's real and what isn't. That is, philosophically. Now, we will see this topic from another point of view: reality TV. It is exactly the same issue Descartes posed, just that instead we have Kim Kardashian, girls and sweet sixteen parties and Flavor Flav. With reality shows, we are not certain if the material presented is actually real.

Oh come on, like you don't know who New York is. 

"I don't think our viewers necessarily differentiate between what's scripted and what's not. Our primary goal is to make a show that is compelling." (110) That's how reality tv directors think our small brains work. That's how stupid they think we are. Sad truth, that's how we are. We don't actually care how real a reality tv show is as long as it has fights and catches our attention. The worst thing is, these shows don't actually depict reality. They just show us, as Shields said, that they are "worse than what [we actually] experience" and "what someone else would do if things turned really bad." (107). And...we dig it. 

The article Brief Lives by Kate Salter from The Guardian talks about a guy who synthesizes a random person's story and writes it in the back of a postcard. He seems to feel so special because people open to him with all these stories, but how does he know they are true? How can he tell what is real and what isn't? He doesn't know who he's dealing with; never met the person and probably never will. That's why it isn't weird when someone talks to him about the presence of aliens, he directly assumes they're crazy, lonely or really desperate. There is no guarantee that there is always certainty in the tales told to us. But since they are completely external to us, at least in this case, we can't judge. Therefore, we go ahead and choose to believe exactly what they told us. 

Reality is in the eye of the beholder, the public. And we distort reality according to how much we want it to be real or not. Unconsciously, we believe what we choose to and adjust it to our own perception. But, have in mind that we also tell what we want to. 

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Considering his answer didn't have but one centimeter of reasoning, I've never been able to figure out the answer to Descartes' question: how do we know what's real and what isn't? The logical answer would be "our senses." Well, our senses cheat us. They do so through psychoactive substances and unconscious states of mind. Memories can be designed, and if they are already part of our hippocampus, we will perceive them as something that did happen. What I'm trying to say here, is that reality is (informally) what we perceive is true and not what we know is true.

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At least I know I'm not alone, David Shields is with me. In his memoir Reality Hunger, as he describes it, he says that he's "interested in the generic edge, the boundary between what are roughly called nonfiction and fiction." (191) We can't distinguish those to words that easily. He then says "Art is real. I make it real by putting it into words." (200) This supports my argument because he is saying that basically what is real is what there is evidence of, what is recorded. Just like memory. Just like the truth. When he puts art down into words (art being writing) he is making a statement that even though it may be refuted, it is true. It is true simply by the fact that it's a statement. He said it. It already exists.

This is why we should live our live assuming everything is a lie. Just like this guy.

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We live not in our lives but in the lives we are told to live in. Wait, but doesn't that mean that those lives are actually our lives...? Don't worry, I'm not disagreeing with Shields; it is tremendously worrying that we are living off and in the popular culture. I'm sorry Camille, I think I'm going to use your aphorism. Wait a second...it's not yours. It's not even Shields' either. Woah. Anyways, "our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any." (242) As I said, our moments aren't ours. They are High School Musical and E! News' creation. Just for the hell of restating: "The 'ordinary' person's cult of personal celebrity is nurtured by these new models of communication and presentation and representation." (245)

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"We live in difficult times: art should be difficult (my goal is to make every paragraph as discomforting as possible)." (249) Why do we lives in difficult times? Because what should be difficult (art) is now tremendously easy. For example, in The Intouchables Driss asks Philippe why he buys an such an expensive painting if it is just a red stain. The typical response would be "because it resembles reality and depicts the point society has reached to." Well, a clever way to use Shields aphorism, is by saying that recognition through that kind of art is very easy to achieve. Everyone appreciates simplistic art because it "shows how crude this world is" and all those not-really-deep reviews. Basically, I can draw a line with a marker right now, name it Greed and become famous. These are indeed difficult times. 

We are now, officially, lost. 

Actually that's from Shields but im not citing just 'cause I also came up with it. 

Commentary Metacognition

Yeah, now that you mention it, the title should've been more specific. I gotta give it to you Mr, it's more towards the "part of the reason why people can use spanglish is because there are so many people that speak both languages." It was kind of hard to have three topics about one that is so similar in many ways.

Also, I should've used some kind of text I could refer to regarding spanglish, a student's paper, a conversation, something. I was originally going to do the conversation but I thought it would be too confusing so I decided to stick to something more more well known, that everyone uses and general.

Thanks for the writing and the conlusion, I actually wrote the whole paper thinking about the conclusion.

I understand what you mean by coherency, I also think I should have stuck onto something more specific and have gone deeper regarding the topics.