Speaking out against Corporate Exploitation

reply to post by WhiteAlice


I decided to do a speech against modern television, and cable companies and such. Hopefully this is still a relevant issue.


The Speech:
Huddled around a glowing box, we spend quite a bit of time. We sit there, staring at a variety of moving pictures and sounds. We listen to what the corporate machine wants to sell us for minutes at a time, waiting patiently for our show of choice to come back on the screen. When the show ends, it leads into an advertisement, and then another show, and so on. Well, how much of your life do you think you’ve used, watching the folks on television fight zombies, or sell Oxy-Clean? How many days worth of commercials have you racked up in your lifetime viewing experience? The television is leading us to our slow death, one of vanity and shallow consumerism. Kill your TV! Before it kills you!

As cable television lurches towards it’s death by starvation in the modern era, programming has gotten worse. The priorities are all wrong, and geared towards the lowest common denominator. Shows like the Jersey Shore, the Apprentice, or Keeping Up With The Kardashians. The figures that people are supposed to look up to are just reprehensible. I watch a lot of old shows, and the main characters are likeable. Of course, this was before the rise of reality TV, so it’s a little different. The shame is, we no longer root for the good old fashioned underdog as much these days.

For example, I was watching the show “Cops”, after watching the Dukes of Hazzard. On Cops, I saw a man make an effort to flee the police and then get savagely beaten on national television and dragged into a squad car. On the Dukes of Hazzard, circa 1979, I saw two good ol’ boys flee a corrupt police force while on a moonshine run. They jumped a creek, the cops went into the water, and everything turned out okay, and without violence. If that show took place in modern day, someone would be dissolving in a bath tub by the end of it. What ever happened to good natured television?

What happened was a reckless pursuit of ratings and a race to the bottom of the barrel. If it bleeds, it leads, and television became an open wound. Even the news caught this disease. If there was a mass shooting, it didn’t matter if they had solved world hunger on the same day, the shooting tends to get more discussion time. And they plaster up the killer’s photograph, and easily influenced loners viewing the news at home realize that they can be famous too, they can be on television. Then a commercial for Coca Cola comes on, he goes down to the super market, buys a can and shoots up the place. He doesn’t get as many people as the last guy though, so the news only mentions him in passing.

The voices from the picture box are here to mislead you, dumb you down, and make you subservient. But there is an answer. You can feed your mind and entertain yourself at the same time. You can read a book. You could listen to music. You don’t have to be an audience to the sort of people who would sell you junk, and tell you lies. Just read a book. I find enjoyment in a piece of literature written by people who wanted to tell a story, instead of watching some reality trash that celebrates the worst qualities of mankind.

So the next time you go into your living room, and you see the gasping last few breaths of the cable company, why don’t you pull the plug? Put them out of their misery, and fill your time by reading a book.

reply to post by Grifter42


Ahh, Grifter42, I commend you on your choice but you really aren't aiming to make any friends? I don't know how many times I've been regarded in an almost pariah like fashion because I don't watch television. People seem to be pretty certain that not watching tv is a mental illness.

reply to post by WhiteAlice


Well, I made a few asides to the small swath of decent programming, but aside from that, television is dying. I didn't want to make an endorsement for "CORPORATE INTERNET STREAMING SERVICE", but such a service has it's use in viewing the few decent films and documentaries they have.

I didn't want to make a speech that people wouldn't feel like it hit the homefront on, so I chose this one. Is having principles a bad thing? Sadly, sometimes it seems like it.

reply to post by Grifter42


Just wondered, as you never mentioned, what class is this for? Politics, sociology, history? Philosophy?

reply to post by woodwardjnr


Speech class. There's some fancy name for it. Fundamentals of speech, I think.

reply to post by Grifter42


Well, the speech went well.

Next one will be on the death penalty, which I will not be posting on here, because it's a group project.