Today I had a bizarre conversation with a customer. Well most conversations with my customers are bizarre but this was more. It involved death and murder and the odd reference to who was making us so angry. The bizarre thing was we were totally engrossed about who had just murdered who (as you do) and who was sleeping with who. But the people we were talking about and engrossed about weren’t real, they weren’t people we knew or related to but people we watch every night in the soaps. There we were totally engrossed and talking about fictitious people as if they were real. We had opinions on what they were and weren’t doing.
Now I am not going to go into all the who’s, why and how’s as sometimes the soaps do cover subjects that otherwise wouldn’t be covered and can open up conversations with children and parents and can help some people understand they are not alone and there are people out there to help them etc. But the same programmes we either sit and watch or have on mindlessly in the background before the so-called watershed are also giving out the messages that sleeping around is ok unless you get caught and that its sort of ok to plan to stab someone or even murder people when your fed up with them. And that’s just in one week in one programme.
But with all that aside are we really that boring that we feel the need to watch make believe stories about make believe people.
Are we so bored with our own lives we have to watch someone else’s lives?
Or maybe watching the soaps make us feel better about ourselves?
I know its been asked many times and will continue to be asked many times but how did the tv become so central in our lives? I don’t mind the educational stuff where we learn things about how things are made or stuff from history but I do think its absolute madness when we sit there and watch other people having a life.
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