THINKING CRITICAL

Reality TV

Photoshop isn’t only used to fake beauty standards. Photoshop can simply fix red eyes or it can be more complex and remove someone and place them in a new location. Back in September BuzzFeed ran an article about a woman that used Photoshop to convince everyone she was oversees, but she never left her home town.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/this-woman-used-photoshop-to-convince-her-family-that-she-we

For 42 days she hid. Afterwards her thoughts were, “If I had the chance to do it again, I don’t think I would do it again,” van den Born said. “I really underestimated the impact of the project on myself and the people around me!”

This had me thinking, how much does media really affect people? I found a statistic on eating disorders and media. In August 2010, a national survey was done, and the result was “70% believed encouraging the media and advertisers to use more average sized people in their advertising campaigns would reduce or prevent eating disorders.” 70% of people believed media could affect someone so much they turn to harmful methods.

Another study from the American Girl Scouts Association found “75 percent said that competition shows (like ‘American Idol’) and 50 percent of ‘real-life’ shows like MTV’s ‘Jersey Shore’ are ‘mainly real and unscripted.’" Sure, this is a study done on 11-17 year olds, but that generation is growing up believing scripted material is reality. Their perception of the real world is literally being formed on someone’s scripted ideas.

In 2011, about 20% of primetime TV was reality TV shows, it has only been rising. The “Bachelor”’s creator stated 70-80% of reality TV is fake. So in 2011, 4-6% of primetime TV was real. How long can this go on?

http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/get-facts-eating-disorders