In the lecture today, an interesting point came up about, are our lives stories/ narratives. The symposiums contention was no, some people hesitated before agreeing. I can see why. Sometimes you feel like its all been one big story. It’s disillusioning to be walking down the street with your iPod playing, then realising that nobody else can hear your music but you; its not like in the movies (Unless you are one of those obnoxious people who have their music on full blast…. i feel sorry for your eardrums.) I guess you realise that life isn’t as planned and magical as a story, some people believe everything happens for a reason, like in a story, but i don’t think that’s true. If you or a loved one went thorough hardships, those hardships weren’t necessarily there for a particular reason, but you may possibly become a stronger person out of it. That just depends on how you deal with life. There is also a huge possibility that it could emotionally cripple you, but you don’t say it happened for a reason then, right? “It happened so they can be in emotional pain forever,” yeah, nah. I guess a lot of these beliefs come down to religion, but the main point is that in a constructed story/ narrative, everything happens for a reason, it has to. In life it doesn’t, you can make a story out of events from your past, but you never know what may determine the future, and sometimes the future isn’t determined by anything in your story.

It was also discussed, how does reality TV fit into this. It’s life, but could it be documentary? narrative?  Arguably its not even real life, it is constructed. I remember on America’s Next Top Model (a show i used to watch religiously), a girl saying that while the cameras weren’t rolling, they were not aloud to speak or interact with each other whatsoever. Every interaction they had had to be on film. It may protect against important interactions being unrecorded, but it probably made the girls uncomfortable and meant they couldn’t develop friendships naturally. I imagine in shows such as Big Brother, its is very much the same, yes there are camera rolling 24/7, but there are so many constructed elements that we don’t see. Last night i was in the control room for a live TV show, only observing, but i was amazed at how many things are going on. Productions like this are far less intimate than they appear on screen, its easy to forget that.