TV Makes Americans Live a Passive Life

TV for Chickens is a project by contemporary Finnish artist, Tea Makipaa. In this project she created a television show showing the lives of free range chickens. She showed this to chickens being raised in a factory farm. Factory farms are dark crowded places where chickens become bored or panicked and often kill themselves or others. John of the “vlogbrothers”, Youtube video bloggers uploaded a video discussing this project. He notes that after watching it the chickens became more docile and less likely to murder one another, and raises the question “If this is what TV does to chickens what does it do to humans?” This is not referring to all television programming but specifically television programs that show us an idealized version of everyday life such as Sex and the City, How I met your mother, Scrubs. Popular television programs create an indifference towards social change, because they offer an idealized escape that convinces us that there is something wrong with our personal approach to living and not something wrong with the systems in place.

We do not live in a perfect society otherwise we would not require an escape. Many of the major social issues involve an emphasis on keeping our heads down and working that we are taught throughout our lives; An ignorance of mental health issues; A lack of acceptance of alternative relationship styles, sexual orientations, or gender identities.

This starts with a lack of work; The characters of Sex and the City, and more recently How I met your mother, seem to have endless amounts of time and energy to eat lunch, go shopping, drink at their favorite bar, or leave work for a long emotional conversation with one of their friends. Even with all of this day time social...

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...of our TV heros.

*Cisgender identification- Identifying with the gender one was assigned at birth based on genitalia.

Works Cited

Gabler, Neal. "Social Networks." Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2012. 355-63. Print.

Bayes, Carte, and Craig Thomas. How I Met Your Mother. CBS. CBS, Los Angeles, California, 19 Sept. 2005. Television.

Star, Darren. Sex and the City. HBO. Manhatten, New York, 6 June 1998. Television.

Lawrence, Bill. Scrubs. ABC. Burbank, California, 2 Oct. 2001. Television.

Brennan, Ian, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy. Glee. FOX. Glendale, California, 19 May 2009. Television.

Levitan, Steven, and Christopher Lloyd. Modern Family. ABC. Los Angeles, California, 23 Sept. 2009. Television.

Green, John. "TV For Chickens." YouTube. YouTube, 27 Sept. 2009. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.