Christopher Schroeder

Author: Christopher Schroeder

  • Reality TV and Me

    I recently finished Emily Nussbaum’s (2024) second book — Cue the Sun! — for a book club.

    Others have considered this book to be an accessible account of the “fusion of authenticity and contrivance” in reality television (Stowell 2024) and the narrativizing and gamifying of its starts (Cunningham 2024). As such, this oral history both challenges negative assumptions and exposes its “seaming underbelly” (Bell 2024).

    I also liked this eminently readable book, which seems to be Nussbaum’s style. I also appreciated its extensive research, including its use of insider observations of those, such as participants and crews, who might otherwise be overlooked in more conventional accounts.

    For these and other reasons, I was more intrigued than I expected. For example, I wanted to know more about the messiness behind the glossy services or the choices to imitate and the willingness to fail, which according to Nussbaum are central to this genre.

    At the same time, I wanted more consistent context, which others have noted (e.g., Bell 2024). I found such perspective useful early in the book for instance in her discussion of An American Family (i.e., chapter three), but I wondered on more than one occasion about moments when it seemed supplanted by personal dramas within programs or behind the scene.

    I also was hoping for more synthesis in its conclusion, especially after the detailed and documented analysis throughout most of this book. I was actually disappointed by the final pages that almost seemed perfunctory, and not quite worth the effort I had made to get to these.

    Both can be seen in The Apprentice chapter (i.e., chapter thirteen). I hadn’t realized how much this program had rehabilitated Donald Trump’s image, and in so doing repackaged him for his initial presidential run. At least some of his second term is obviously indebted to his first, but that might not have been possible without his makeover from this reality show.

    However, I was reminded of, and grateful for, her thoughtful approach to pop culture that I had encountered in her first book I Like to Watch.

    Its title was a declaration and a challenge. Its content was even more so.

    I was raised in a home where television for religious reasons had been banned. As perhaps a result, I never developed an informed perspective on it, a condition that was reinforced in graduate school. Television as a child was evil and after grad school also insubstantial and thus inferior.

    Not until I read Nussbaum’s first book did I recognize how misinformed I was. Her accounts of The Sopranos for example and other programs fascinated me. Her populist, and personal, aesthetics, and her intellectual ethics, resonated with me, and reinforced instincts that until this book had been overwhelmed and lost in the din and noise.

    In this and other ways, she reminds me to be more tolerant and thoughtful, and honest. She also suggests a significance for anyone who is willing to meet the public where it is, and to use tools and training to think more critically and carefully about the cultural content we’re consuming and the concomitant worlds we’re envisioning.

    What more could I expect?

  • A Little Privacy Please

    My kids cannot understand what I’m sure they would consider my obsession with privacy.

    They technically didn’t grow up with cell phone, and got their first in middle school. Still, they’ve spent most of their lives with these devices, and the cultural changes created by these, and they insist upon the death of privacy.

    I often ask in response why they don’t post their iCloud passwords on social media, or even give these to me. They obviously don’t and won’t but also don’t consider such stances as pro-privacy choices.

    I still advocate for the use of Signal for example as our messaging app of choice and ask about the more than 700 trackers, and almost 1,900 ads, blocked by my VPN over nine hours. They mostly ignore me.

    I was reminded this week of these different expectations in of all places a public bathroom at a prestigious private research hospital.

    I noticed the person at an adjacent urinal using his cell phone. I overheard another in a stall having a conversation, which continued at the sink — the phone was wedged between his shoulder and his ear — and as he left.

    Such experiences are surprisingly commonplace, and have been so for some time. I actually was once debating whether to ask someone to stow his phone as I watched him drop it in the urinal he was using and then fish it from the brackish water.

    I can understand why some think privacy no longer exists. At the same time, I fear the intrusion of these devices into all areas of human experience, and the absence of informed debates about these intrusions throughout everyday lives.

    We need to talk more about the recent Apple iCloud encryption changes for UK users or Amazon Alexa changes for everyone who uses its Echo devices. Otherwise, we are relinquishing freedoms and rights that we might wish one day, and perhaps in the not too distant future, we still had.

    Perhaps we can start with what should be obvious, and thus easy, agreements, such as cell phone in public bathrooms.

  • Hands Off and On

    To My Elected Officials and Other Members of Congress:

    I was one of thousands in Chicago, and millions across the country, who spent Saturday afternoon sending a message.

    This message to the Trump administration was that we’ve already had enough, and that we’re prepared to stand for the preservation of our political principles and values. Many more of us didn’t vote for you than those who did, and we insist upon being counted.

    And to our elected officials, it was that we will support efforts to resist this widespread dismantling of American ideals, and that we expect you to stand in front of, and lead, us. You can count on us, but we must be able to count on you. Anything less is unacceptable.

    That is in fact what democracy looks like.

    A Concerned Constituent and Fellow Citizen