A prediction or fiction?

[strange]

Does anyone else think that the road humanity is going down may lead to actual TV shows like the Running Man or extreme game shows and reality tv? It seems as reality tv becomes more popular and more surreal (which begs to question why it's still called reality tv:dunno:?) but do you think reality tv or tv shows will dissolve into that sort of cruel viewing or am i just being paranoid?

[Bryan James]

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?

Yes.

[Lencho_of_the_Apes]

Good science fiction should be able to project cultural trends into the future, the same way it does with technological advances. For example, writers in the 30s-40s-50s-60s that thought about overpopulation, or...

An even better example: if you're familiar with the movie "Idiocracy", the basic idea for that was thought of in the 1950's, long before the movie makers started thinking about how dumb the world was getting. ("The Marching Morons", by Fredrik Pohl aand C.M. Kornbluth.)


If you think you see society moving in a direction similar to what you read in The Running Man, that just means that the seeds of something like that were visible to Sai King at the time he wrote the book.


We all float down here.

[marew1]

I hope it never comes to that. We need good, entertaining, programs.

[bryras]

I can actually see cruel programming happening. I bet the some pretty crazy ideas have actually been pitched already. I have trouble with a lot of the reality shows now so if they get much worse I guess I can always turn the TV off and read more!

[wally wonder]

what i liked about the running man is that ben is accused of having ideas inconsistent with the racial act of 2004 or some darn thing. what's uncanny about that in the story is that not only is the date about the same time that fashionable ideology came down the pike, but there was another, something about the seattle riots, and darned if something like that didn't happen when the big heads met there to do what big heads do, fock with the little heads.

but i did see something on the tellie not too long ago (within the last six months) channel surfing, bunch of oriental judges--they spoke one of the oriental languages and there was no helpful bouncing ball jumping across a written translation--shine little glow worm, quiver!--and these contestants were lined up across the table from each other and the opposing team member would pull some kind of lever and someone on the other team would/or would not get some kind of wallop in the stomach area. great fun!

i miss the fights in hockey. they don't show them like they used to. guys whacking each other, or trying to, pulling the other guy's jersey up over his head. but there was one player who was seriously injured (that i know about) last season. go wings.

i think president obama should grow a beard. that'd be on my essay.

[brandon]

kinda answers your own question with that last post I think:smile2:

[ginapenn]

It never fails to amaze me how far ahead of his time Mr. King is. He is definitely a forward thinker.

Listening to WKIT and loving it!

[bryantburnette]

I think the specifics of The Running Man are fictional, and will probably stay that way, but that there is also a lot of fundamental truth to it. There is no doubt in my mind that a large segment of the viewing audience for reality shows -- and I'm thinking here more along the lines of Rock of Love-type shows and their ilk than I am of contest-based shows like survivor or American Idol -- is tuning into these things so that they can feel good about despising people. They are giving themselves permission to feel superior to others.

In a way, that's no different than some of the attitudes Ben Richards encounters in the Running Man, which partially revolves around the idea of the well-to-do watching shows so that they can feel superior to the people who form what they perceive to be the dregs of society.

We're a long way from shows in which people are murdered for sport. However, if the right sociological conditions -- civil war, for example, or continued economic collapse, or environmental catastrophe -- were to arise and nudge us toward the fringes politically speaking...? I have absolutely zero doubt in my mind that our culture could, under circumstances like that, find its way toward something very similar to The Running Man or The Long Walk.

If it ever happens, I hope I'm not around to know about it.

[Roou*]

i agree with the comments
and it's happening now, slowly but there are alot of trashy reality shows...
some people enjoy that realitys so yeah i think this history could be real in some years :P

[motocop]

I do think the pollution will get as bad as King wrote about but as far as the violence for viewing, enough people will not want to see that to let it not make the air.

[Mr Nobody]

It's an uncomfortable thought, but tbh I think there could be a time when 'extreme reality' shows do end up like The Running Man - especially in a black and white, with us or against us ideology. Paedophiles, terrorists, notorious murderers...they'd all be likely contestants.
Now, I have the same reaction as many - 'Surely it'd never happen. People wouldn't stand for it' - but already over the last 10 years or so I've been amazed by what large sections of the public will stand for...and what, given the right conditions, they will positively advocate and lap up. On my more or less daily trawl through the news (you never know when you might come across something worth reading, like a recent interview with Joe Hill), looking at some of the readers' comments can be a bit of a scary prospect - and that's on a broadsheet, so God only knows what the 'red top' comments sections are like.

[Pucker]

There are already programs which encourage people to debase themselves in front of an audience for money and our entertainment, as there are police procedural programs -- and even one that glorifies bounty hunting. You can watch guys getting shot at (and hit) on Cops . You can watch scapegoating and all manner of Machiavellian shenanigans on shows like Survivor. You can watch idiocy raised to an art form on any number of "reality" programs.I would prefer not to believe that society will degenerate to the point where people are lining up to risk actual life and limb in torture chambers, but The Running Man -- at least in its embryonic stage -- is already here.

[GNTLGNT]

I've said it before, ad nauseum-that we are near the end of civil-ization, and we're about to drive over the cliff with "Reality" TV at the wheel...:down:

[Ranger_Strider]

I doubt that the producers/editors of most reality shows would allow any footage of a person in the throes of some personal upset/heavy emotional experice to hit the editing-room floor. Quite the opposite I should think. I don't regularly tune in to any of that sort of programming because it feels dirty and voureristic to me and not at all pleasurable to witness. I have this little voice in the back of my brain that says none of this is any of my business and it's really best left private to the people involved. So, ultimately, if the Running Man ever becomes real, it will be the people with remotes/channel changers in there hands who are to blame.

[Stillreading]

The majority of us contribute virtually nothing to the betterment of society, instead we are pulled along like kids on a sled by the rare geniuses and leaders amongst us. To endure our inertia we pacify and numb ourselves with myriad forms of entertainment as we attempt to give meaning to the passage of time that is our lives. The difference is that today we have more ways in which to numb and pacify ourselves than ever before -- however, the line that links the Roman Gladiators to our modern day MMA stars remains strong and clear. I don't think we're declining necessarily, I just think we're doing what we've always done, the way we've always done it. In other words we've just painted the same room a different colour and claimed superiority. It's not necessarily wrong or right, either; it's just the way we are. I think the very fact that so many people fight so desperately and tenaciously for so many seemingly trivial things is perhaps because deep down inside -- layers beneath Hollywood, government propaganda, tv marketing, and rampant materialism -- we're actually all terrified that there is no meaning to existence. And I think our fear expresses itself most naturally through hostility and violence -- vicariously or otherwise. The Running Man is a brilliant story for that reason: even Ben, our hero(anti-hero)/protagonist embodies, reveals, and displays the inconsistencies and the malleability of morality. We are helpless against the times and places in which we live, and when it comes down to it, and push comes to shove, when life faces death, we find that we're really more chimpanzee than human.

[Sophiia]

I saw some 1984 in this, did anyone else or am I being silly?

It did seem a bit like that, the oppression etc, I love books like that.

Like the Handmaid's Tale by Atwood.

Anyone?

[Connie Reader]

The first time I saw Fear Factor I got the shivers.
I agree with Stillreading, there are more similarites between US and the Roman Empire than is comfortable, not just in entertainment but in government as well.
I do love me some MMA.