i7omahawki said:
While I think the shows, and Brooker's other work, is fantastic at criticizing modern trends and thought, I don't think it is very good at establishing its own, independent value-system, or general ethos. It always seems direct against something, rather than for anything in particular. That said, I think the 'great despising' process is an important one to (eventually) reach a point where we can set up culture that aims to empower audiences, rather than subjugate them.
A lot of media students tell me he's a little out of date with current theory, but as a media dabbler (I took one course) I think I understand his point to a degree, and I think it would be slightly naive to offer an easy answer, because there doesn't seem to be one.
Television (and moving pictures in general) is fundamentally more persuasive than other forms of media. People enjoy it and get sucked into it and can forget that it's a constructed image, because it seems incredibly "real". We don't watch porn to watch dead-eyed heroin addicts or desperate women from Eastern Europe fuck in uncomfortable temperatures while a director yells instructions, we watch it because we can suspend disbelief. That sometimes has horrible consequences, and yet how do you stop people from doing that when it's the precise reason they can enjoy it?
If you were an optimist, you could say that the 'point' of most things Charlie Brooker has done is encouraging people to be critical about what they watch, and that that's already a big step on the way to a better model of television. People can be taught to be more aware of when they are being manipulated, and that in itself will ultimately make television better by removing some of the rewards of manipulating people.
Ultimately though, you can't really tell people to be critical of television without using television and the same manipulative techniques which make popular television popular. That's also why there's no easy way out of this, and why I think (on topic) the ending of that film had to be fucking devastating, because otherwise it would just be hypocritical in the extreme.
I think the overall message is simple. Be critical. Don't think or believe that what you're seeing is somehow honest or true or insightful just because it's presented as such. Don't lower your standards just because something appears on television, because everything is in some way constructed and artificial, if nothing else because a camera has to be there to film it. Recognize when you're being manipulated. If you can do that, then you're already capable of demanding better and ultimately (hopefully) of getting better.
Unfortunately, I'm not an optimist. I think that demystifying the manipulative aspects of television would also remove the "magic", so I'm not convinced it's going to happen.
