What seems most remarkable to
me isn’t so much how prescient this sketch turns out to have been as how much
more honest the format is, to the viewers if not to the contestants. Modern
reality television has subjected contestants to activities at least this unpleasant,
and potentially even more hazardous to life and limb, starting with shows like “Fear
Factor” and “Survivor” and continuing to the current day. But where the
fictional Irwin Mainway and whatever heartless production company was behind
him were openly making fun of people, and inviting their audience to laugh at
these suckers/contestants, the modern reality show hosts (and, one assumes,
producers) go on endlessly about how exciting and competitive their contests
are, and how well their contestants are dealing with the challenges involved…
Now, I would be the first to
admit that this isn’t a new idea. A number of television series have based
episodes around the concept over the years, and there are at least three
full-length movies of which I’m aware that have been released on the same
themes. I will also admit, however, that I have started worrying about the long-term
effects of both encouraging people to be credulous idiots and encouraging other
people to watch them and laugh. As the world becomes more complicated all
around us it gets easier every year to make an innocent mistake that can screw
up your entire life. Even ten years ago if you lost your cell phone, the worst
that would happen is that you would report it as lost/stolen, have the carrier
deactivate the account and give you a new one, and buy a new phone. If you’d
bothered to sign up for the insurance, they’d just give you a new one. Today
that same phone could allow someone to drain your bank account and max out all
of your credit cards before you noticed it was gone…
I point this out for a number
of reasons, not least of which is I’m worried about the corrosive effect this
is having on our society; however, the effects on business, and particularly on
business strategy, may be even worse. Business runs on information, even more
so than money, and without complete and accurate information it isn’t possible
to plan your activities or make competent decisions. If you base your
calculations on bad data there is no way you can possibly get the right answers
(the infamous programmer’s term GIGO – garbage in, garbage out – comes into
play here), and with people deliberately introducing nonsensical information into
reference sources just for the fun of watching more people behave like
credulous idiots it’s getting harder every day just to tell what is real and
what is supposed to be humor…
Earlier this week I noticed a
clickbait item trumpeting that Don Knotts had just blurted out his “real” reasons
for leaving the Andy Griffith Show. Which sounds like minor celebrity gossip,
at best, until you realize that Mr. Knotts has been dead for eleven years as of
today’s writing, and he revealed the complete rationale for leaving the show in
the early 1970s. Heaven only knows what kinds of malware or online scams you
might be subjecting yourself to if you clicked on that link, but the one thing
I’m fairly sure of is that if you did click on it you would not have learned
anything about the late Don Knotts that everybody else didn’t know forty years
ago. If you make a practice of clicking on such links you probably won’t learn
anything else, either, but you’ll definitely have qualified for an appearance
on the next Irwin Mainway production when it comes out…
And that’s still not even the
worst of it…
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