{"id":20840,"date":"2016-01-19T07:00:43","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20840"},"modified":"2016-01-18T20:11:40","modified_gmt":"2016-01-19T00:11:40","slug":"peak-alaska","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/01\/19\/peak-alaska\/","title":{"rendered":"Peak Alaska"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Alaska\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Turn on your TV and I bet you can find a show about Alaska. A partial list of Alaska-themed reality shows airing between 2005 and today includes\u00a0Deadliest Catch, Alaskan Bush People, Alaska the Last Frontier, Ice Road Truckers, Gold Rush, Edge of Alaska, Bering Sea Gold, The Last Alaskans, Mounting Alaska, Alaska State Troopers, Flying Wild Alaska, Alaskan Wing Men, <\/em>and the latest, Alaska Proof<\/em>, premiering last week on Animal Planet, a show that follows an Alaskan distillery team as they strive to \u201cbottle the true Alaskan spirit.\u201d And with Alaska Proof, <\/em>I submit that we have saturated the Alaskan genre; we have reached Peak Alaska. We may see a few new Alaska shows, but it’s likely on the decline. I don’t imagine we have many Alaskan activities left yet unexplored.<\/p>\n

Television programming remains a staple of American Leisure, even as the practice\u00a0of television watching continues to change (e.g., it\u2019s often done through a device that\u2019s not a TV). As a leisure activity, consumers expect their TV to entertain, compel, and also, provide comfort. What\u00a0content and forms will entertain, compel and comfort shift with cultural and historical developments. Our media products are therefore useful barometers for measuring the zeitgeist of the time.\u00a0\u00a0Marshall McLuhan argues in\u00a0The Medium is the Message<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>that\u00a0<\/em>upon something’s peak, when it is on the way out, that thing becomes most clearly visible. And so, with Alaska peaking in clear view, I ask, what does our Alaskan obsession tell us about ourselves?\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the \u00a01980s and early \u201890s,\u00a0the family sitcom reigned. These years held the ideological pinnacle of neoliberal individualism. Materialism ruled, regulations waned, and shoulder pads<\/a> helped each American take up a little more space. By my count, Time\u2019s<\/em> 2006 designation<\/a> of \u201cYou\u201d as the person of the year was about two decades late. Around this time, we also saw a quickly changing family structure. Divorce was\u00a0on the rise, family size on the decline, and dual incomes becoming increasingly necessary and normative.<\/p>\n

With anxieties surrounding shifting\u00a0family life, it\u2019s no surprise that the Full House\/Family Matters genre rose to prominence. People wanted to sink into their couches to enjoy 30\u00a0open and closed minutes of close-knit characters\u00a0who cared for each other and solved disputes with a quiet knock on the bedroom door, some\u00a0short self-reflexive dialogue, and a warm hug, finally relieving the tension with a shucks-worthy joke. It was a dose of wholesome. Warm and safe like a diagonal cut grilled cheese and tall glass of milk.<\/p>\n

Today, we\u2019ve moved beyond the formulaic family comedy. We want complex characters and believability. We expect\u00a0continuity and semiotic ambiguity, the kind of programming that spurns debate and post-show discussions<\/a> with fans, creators, and actors. Or alternatively, we want voyeuristic satisfaction, long-form documentaries in the form of 50 minute segments spread across 12-16 episodes. But that doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019ve stopped seeking comfort. We still need our entertainment to offer reprieve from the troubles that worry us in everyday life, the concerns that accompany societal change. We still want fantasy and escape, even while demanding a realist lens.<\/p>\n

Enter Alaska.<\/p>\n

The most obvious of contemporary shifts comes in the form of digitization\u00a0and automation. We are <\/em>the digital revolution, and people aren\u2019t sure what that means, but they know things have changed and will never again be the same.<\/p>\n

Our conversations needn\u2019t require saliva. A day of work may elicit tears, but rarely blood or sweat. Dirt under the fingernails is more likely to originate in a community garden than on a factory floor or family farm. Our muscles may be sore, but mostly from yoga, and we can soothe ourselves with a scented bath and monthly massage membership. The gritty physicality of Alaska shines brightly against the sterile experience of everyday life here on the mainland.\u00a0We are clean, and soft\u2014at least those of us with disposable time to binge watch and disposable income to buy the commercial goods that drive programming decisions\u2014 and we are pretty sure this means something has been lost.<\/p>\n

To be clear, our use of technology is far from actually <\/em>clean. It\u2019s actually incredibly dirty, requiring intense physical labor and causing extreme environmental strife. But we don\u2019t want to know about the dirt and we don\u2019t feel it in our everyday lives. And so we watch Alaskans. Or at least our fantasy of Alaskans. Those majestic\u00a0creatures unsoiled by streaming News Feeds or celebrity gossip.<\/p>\n

We watch them toil on the land. Hunt for their food and can jars of honey. We watch them barter instead of buy, and fashion Christmas gifts out of beaver parts. We watch them do things that most of us have not the skill, opportunity, nor need to practice.<\/p>\n

Alaskans are a specimen of anthropological fascination. They give us back to ourselves as we never were, and know we never will be. They are a vestige of the rugged individualism that drives the American value system. They ease us with their living-off-the-land, even as we livetweet<\/a> their experiences. \u00a0We watch with reverence, our heads titled in slight confusion. And we watch desperately, for fear that these relics, these strange exemplars of the simple life, where a hard day\u2019s work is its own reward, will remain\u00a0only as part of the historical record.<\/p>\n

Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis<\/a><\/p>\n

Headline Pic: Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turn on your TV and I bet you can find a show about Alaska. A partial list of Alaska-themed reality shows airing between 2005 and today includes\u00a0Deadliest Catch, Alaskan Bush People, Alaska the Last Frontier, Ice Road Truckers, Gold Rush, Edge of Alaska, Bering Sea Gold, The Last Alaskans, Mounting Alaska, Alaska State Troopers, Flying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[892],"tags":[36455,11350,94],"class_list":["post-20840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay","tag-alaska","tag-neoliberalism","tag-television"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20840"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20856,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20840\/revisions\/20856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}