Life The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

October 5, 2011 In his 1998 book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neil Gabler wrote, “One does not necessarily have to cluck in disapproval to admit that entertainment is … mindless, formulaic, predictable and subversive.” What Gabler is trying to say is that you do not have to be against entertainment, to know it to be droll. TheDailyGreen.com reported that the average teenager spends over 50 hours submerged in the world of the media per week, that’s 30% of the week, an increase from five years ago. This lost time could be used to further education, play sports, or contribute to our country. We as members of a society must push for a change in entertainment, mainly in the form of television, before the amount of mind-numbing ‘pleasure’ we are being exposed to plunges our society into social disorder and personal atrophy.
Between the years of 2005- 2009 Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Paris Hilton have all been either arrested or caught in a series of erratic fits. A 2006 AOL poll asked people who the worst villain of the year was and coming in at number one was Britney Spears. The Sun, British newspaper got a private interview with Lindsey Lohan, back in 2007, when she stated, “I tried to mask my problems with alcohol, cocaine, and mind-altering substances.” These are the people that our society is looking up to and making their role models. Maybe Lindsey isn’t the only one on mind-altering substances. Why aren’t more people following educational programs and channels or people that can make a positive difference, or better yet why are we wasting away inside instead of going out and making a difference ourselves? This is exactly the point Gabler was communicating when he said that entertainment would dissolve the ties of our social