Tag: reality

A letter

Dear Sir,

I’m writing to express my disagreement with your idea of entertainment. I am, of course, referring to a number of programmes telecast in your channel.

First, let’s talk about the reality show you call, Real People, Real Lives. For one, I don’t think there’s anything real about paying celebrities to pretend to live together for a month, and appointing a mediator to solve petty disagreements between them. After all, these celebrities have no reason to live together—except perhaps for the money you pay them, and for the controversial paparazzi that ensues. If you and your children spend your evenings watching this show, I’m sorry, but you all need to get a life.

Second, I came across a programme that your channel’s hosts dub as Share your Feelings. Now, I may have to agree that sharing emotions and deep feelings may have a positive effect on the person doing the sharing. Having said that, however, I do not agree that sharing on national television, a story about how I let my boyfriend down by lying to him, is not a decent way of expressing my feelings. And I don’t think that you or your channel’s hosts should encourage such behaviour, and play irrelevant songs to trigger even more emotional callers. Callers might get some solace — sad though it is — but for a young family watching the show at home over dinner, it’s nothing more than a mindless way to spend the evening.

Now I understand that your choice of programmes doesn’t depend on what your audience wants to or needs to watch. Instead, it depends on what will get them excited to keep on watching. It doesn’t take a master’s degree in Psychology to decode your algorithm: You just give people sensational issues so that they get used to it and keep coming back for more. It’s not unlike training a dog by giving it chocolate treats that you know would only harm it. It’s simple logic, yet a powerful influence.

And that’s the reason I ask—implore(well… no)—you to reconsider your offering. Not only are your shows mind-numbing and disgust-inducing, but they are also a spark of painful-disagreement between husbands and wives all over the country. Well, yes, I haven’t spoken to my wife in a few days, and that’s perhaps why I decided to write to you in the first place, but nevertheless, it’s time for you and your channel’s administrators to call that long over-due meeting and reassess your goals for the new year.

With that I conclude this letter. And although I’m certain—beyond belief—that you would never acknowledge reading this letter, or even the existence of it, I would still like to tell you that your feature programme titled News Around the World in 60 Seconds is the best of all in your agenda.

I don’t look forward to hearing from you,

Not a fan,

n

Deep reasoning

Rebelling had landed him here. He was only one not to weep or shudder while they chained him and mauled him. We wailed. I remember my initial days—how I’d begged to get out and see the sky hang over my head. He did nothing of the sort. He walked held his head high, with complete disregard for the guards escorting him.

Dark, bald, non-christian — he resembled everything our captors despised. Despite that, he remained steadfast. Being in the gallows, he told me, was better than being shallow.

I recoiled. I served for attacking a classmate of different colour.

When copywriters code

I’m a hopeless romantic, if I have to say the least about myself. Robert M. Pirsig, in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, classifies people into two types: romantics and classics. I’m the romantic. In the bluntest of terms, romantics are creative thinkers and classics are logical thinkers. Of course both types would have interchangeable qualities, but on a macro level, romantics dream up while classics drill down.

Now that I’ve established a basic, arguable nonetheless, definition of the term, let me emphasise. I’m a romantic, and I’m hopeless at that.

Romantics don’t think like machines. We learn to look at nature, to observe what’s around us, and interpret them in the most beautiful way, or in the most natural way. Classics, on the other hand, learn to look at something and analyse why something appears some way. We appreciate how a flower’s stem balances its five petals whereas classics calculate the stem’s ability to bear the petals. It’s a slight difference when you put it that way, but a much more alarming one when you look at it in a real workplace scenario.

I am a copywriter surrounded by software engineers. I’m a romantic in the midst of classics. I write stories, and they write software. We co-exist to help customers do better business. Now that’s a nice picture. But the real problem arises during a conversation, when the programmers talk about parse and encryption and my mind’s thinking about prose and enchantment.

It didn’t take long for me to realise I was out of place, and I had to learn to code to feel in place. I didn’t have to become a developer—I knew I never could—but I had to develop basic knowledge of how programmers use language. And so I began. I sat with a developer while they wrote a piece of program, and I observed in their eyes the frantic whizzing in their mind. They spoke to the screen in front of them, reasoning out the flow of script. The first line of code would run once before moving on to the second. Swapping the order of the lines would disrupt the entire program. Replacing a semicolon, adding an extra colon or an extra space would topple things in the most inconvenient way. (“Yay!” I yelled. “It’s the same with writing,” though the developers weren’t as excited.)

After a few days under development, I concluded that we romantics don’t learn to think the way computers do. Regardless of all technology innovations, computers don’t and won’t think like humans. As a non-developer I could see how I had to alter my way of thinking and approaching a problem to explain it to a computer. For a logical flow that I take for granted, the computer needs a line of script. When I think I’d fetch water, my mind knows I’d drink it. But if I told a computer to fetch water, it’d fetch it and keep it aside until I tell it—again—that it should drink half of it and save the rest.

We romantics don’t condition our minds to think one step at a time. That’s why it’s hard for us to learn programming at a later age. We think in blocks of actions, in phrases, in groups of words, and instructions. We read poetry that distributes one meaning in five lines. We process a poem as a whole to understand its meaning. We’re clustered thinkers because it’s ingrained in our minds. Classics, however, think in a sequence. That’s what a degree in computer science gives them. They take actions one step at a time. They’re more organised thinkers because that’s what’s ingrained in their minds.

My eureka moment: With enough practice, I could start thinking like a programmer, too. It felt like I had opened the door to a whole new world. I could speak to any computer, and tell it what to and when to do. The thought awed me, and terrified me at the same time.

Perhaps classics would feel the same way if they spent a few days reading Shakespeare.

Fragrance

Drenched in sweat, Mike walked in with a smug face. Waving, he walked over to the pool table. Laying his backpack on the floor, he high-fived Mark, Paul, and Rud one at a time.

As always, they looked at him in jealousy. “Woah, you smell of sand and water. Where?” Rud asked passing him a beer.

“Oh, just a small hike,” Mike took a large swig before adding, “32 miles.”

The others looked inspired, and he cherished each second. Rud whistled. “Wow, man. Hiking, swimming, bushwalking—what a life!”

Mike smiled. All thanks to the girl down at the fragrance store.