This OP is inspired by the British versions of Big Brother. The winner of the first series, and one of the favourites for winner of the second, are unquestionably not the sharpest tools in the box. The tabloid media has been almost openly celebrating their lack of a devious / intellectual / leftie / liberal / broadsheet-reading nature.
In my humble opinion, this seems symptomatic of a wider trend in the media of celebrating anti-intellectualism. Quiz shows celebrate stupidity (The Weakest Link being a case in point) and make it the focal point for audiences. Would we really rather see stupid people’s mistakes than see someone answer questions correctly and win something?
Has intelligence become so closely associated with deviousness, money-making, duplicity and manipulativeness that it’s not A Good Thing? Why does the media seem to emphasise regard being less intelligent but more open as something more worthwhile?
Or am I barking totally up the wrong tree here? Is this OP a sign of the arrogant intellectualism that the tabloid/populist media is raging against?
When Chuck Barris wanted to create a new game show, he wanted it to be a talent show. Problem was, there isn’t usually enough good talent for a daily show. “No problem,” he thought. “I’ll use bad talent.” And thus The Gong Show was born.
Jeopardy’s been around for decades. Big-time winners rarely make any kind of news. Then along comes The Weakest Link… Even WWTBAM gets a lot of press, not so much as for the million dollard part, as for the “agony of defeat” bits when people choke completely on easy questions.
But it was a magnificent crash and burn, Crusoe! You should be proud of walking away from something like that.
I’ll take a couple shots at answering your OP, however. First, people generally don’t like to be made to feel dumb. Thus, if everybody on a quiz show is dumb as dirt, you’re not alienating that many people (except, of course, for the handful of people who are offended by all the attention paid to the stupid people).
Second, it’s a lot of (cruel) fun to laugh at dumb people. Witness every movie Jim Carrey has ever made. Actually, bad example, since Jim Carrey movies all suck. But you see my point.
Combine non-aliention of the audience and the opportunity to laugh at dumb people . . . suddenly you’ve got blockbuster television. It’s gold, I tell ya, gold!
I don’t think I walked away from that, Minty, I think that was one of those ‘refusing to acknowledge my own death’ moments.
Anyway, thanks for the points. I suppose that makes sense. More intelligent people get a laugh or (if they’re so inclined) the chance to feel smug, the less intelligent get to see someone like them being successful.
Poor Crusoe. Just get back on your feet, massage your brain back into place, and soldier on!
Perhaps it is better said that the viewers of any given gameshow are quite possibly drawn more heavily from the lower 50% of the general population than from the upper–the upper half is, on average, more likely to be reading a book or watching Masterpiece Theatre or something.
That was actually the discussion I had with my other half, who claimed it was technically possible to have 50% on the lower side of a bell curve. Me, I don’t know.
But…isn’t that the definition of a bell curve? That the distribution is such that 50% of the population/test group/survey sample are below the median and 50% of same are above the median? Wouldn’t anything else indicate a skewed sample?
I know of three kinds of average. (The dictionary has a lot more kinds)
Mean (most common meaning): add all values together and divide by the number of values:
Mean(1,1,1, 5) = (1+1+1+5)/4 = 2
Three values are below the mean and one is above.
Someone here had a sig that said: The vast majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs.
Median: the middle value (or mean of the two middle values for an even number of values) The joke works for the median.
Mode: the most frequent value. The mode of 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5 is 5.
I’ll bet 50% of you knew this already
I work in advertising. Well, I work in the IT Department of a major advertising corporation, that’s more or less ‘working in advertising’, yes?
Anyway, it seems obvious to me that advertising works best the less the audience is thinking and the closer it is to vegetative status. Not only can you discern this from the advertisements, it is also pretty obvious that there is a conspiracy against sponsoring any television show that would be substantially more entertaining than the ads or stimulate critical thinking in the audience.
To take a stab at things: people like watching (other) stupid people mess up because it makes them feel better by comparison. The depressing truth is that humans are selfish and petty, and if watching a stranger turn himself into a bufoon on TV gives us an emotional lift, we will. If ya asks me, that’s exactly why Forrest Gump was such a popular movie – the fundamental message is a rather depressing one (“You can achieve greatness by merely stumbling mindlessly through life”), but people wanted to see themselves as being better than Tom Hanks, and paid $7/ticket to do so.
As for stupid people winning TV shows … well, I haven’t watched any of those “reality” programs, so I can’t say for sure. At a minimum, I imagine that the winners of the quiz shows would have to be pretty smart in order to make it through the questions (though I hear the US version of Millionare is easier than the UK version). As for “popularity” contests like Big Brother, the audience will vote for who it likes to watch – and as I hypothesized above, people prefer to watch folks who are “beneath” them, just for perverted pleasure.
Of course, it’s one thing all together to watch a nincompoop on TV, and another to vote for him as President, but that’s a different topic…
I agree with rjung about the not-so-subtle subtext behind Forrest Gump (don’t forget that the intelligent and active girlfriend was punished in the end with a disease).
There’s something more to pop culture’s anti-intellectual bias than just enjoying people stupider than we are on television. Consider, for example, going out to a restaurant with friends. When it comes time to divide up the check and calculate the tip, you can count on somebody rolling their eyes and saying, “You guys figure this out, I’m terrible at math,” as if it’s some kind of merit badge or something.
I also found myself in a huge argument with some people about the Apollo Moon Hoax thing. (Yeah, I know, we’re all sick of it. Guess which side I was on. No, really, guess.) I quickly ran through the standard counterarguments to that particular claim, and proceeded to more general points about how to recognize B.S. on first glance. You know the drill, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” “Who would profit from such a scheme,” “How many people are required to maintain silence on a conspiracy,” and so on. These are the cornerstones of critical thinking, and to my shock and horror I found myself marginalized as “the guy who thinks too much.”
I don’t know about you, but I find the notion that people who actually try to think can be criticized for it to be utterly depressing.
No, in a bell curve the bulk of people are at the median, and the rest (the sides of the curve) are people who are above or below the median, with the fewest people being the farthest from the median(be it the genius or the severely retarded.)50% of people could be at the median while 25% are below it to varying degrees and 25% above it to varying degrees. Did anyone else read The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein & Charles Murray for the hell of it?
Then there are the people on boards like this one, who, when caught in a mistake in spelling or grammar, will retort, “Ehh, I wasn’t an English major,” as though there is something wrong with knowing how to write English well!
People just don’t like to admit having made a mistake and the immature ones will make up an excuse instead of owning up to it.
It wouldn’t really be correct to say that the TV audience enjoy watching people screwing up and being humiliated. After all, when we watch a baseball game, we don’t expect to see lousy players making numerous mistakes. We want to see some of the world’s best athletes making a good effort to win the game.
But the question of intelligence in game shows is different. To a great extent, there’s this idea that intelligence determines where in the social order we end up, with smarter people getting more power and better jobs. But people don’t want to accept that they’re dumber than their more successful counterparts, so they take pleasure in seeing the “smarter” members of society being torn down and “exposed” as bearers of only mediocre intelligence.