Modernism, Postmodernism, ...

This is either going to sound stupid or prescient in six months...This article and Trigger Happy TV are two symbols of a new movement that is currently evolving and hasn't grown to a point where it is easily identifiable and nameable.

I apologize for the vagueness--I just thought of this a few minutes ago--but my gut tells me there is something unique about society today that has given birth to these types of pranks. Maybe it's a reaction to reality TV, based on these premises:

1. Real life is different from television. (Ten years ago, almost all television programs clearly existed in a different, more exaggerated world than the one we wash our laundry and drive to work in.)

2. In the past several years, non-scripted reality programs have "hijacked" reality and brought it into the TV world. In other words, the definition of what TV is (previously, only scripted programs) has expanded, and the definition of what is uniquely real life (previously, boring stuff like living in a house with roommates) has shrunk.

3. In response to this, perhaps out of subconscious resentment at having real life processed for entertainment rather than experienced, some people have begun to take the weirdest, most artificial elements that used to be exclusive to the TV world and put them in real life (e.g. an improv group taking all 39 listening booths at a Virgin Megastore)

Hence Trigger Happy TV and the pranks by the people in these articles. I'm unsure about what I wrote for #3. I could very well be off. But I do believe this form of a prank is unique to our time and has been spurned somehow by conditions in the last ten years. If you want to add your own thoughts to what's motivating these types of pranks, I'll link to your web page or post your comments here.

Update1: The real motivation for these pranks may be a "I've seen everything" attitude shared by many people, created both by an entertainment culture that has almost reached its limit trying to one-up itself, and greater social acceptance of "different people." You may look twice if you see a man walk down the street in full drag, but think of how someone would have reacted 30 years ago (or 30 years from now).

So these pranks can be looked at as another way to one-up what has been done before (e.g. a man dressed in a squirrel suit rather than drag) or as a way to gently poke fun at people who bury themselves in their own worlds because the real world isn't interesting enough to deserve their attention. Perhaps before, comedy and drama asked the question, "How would Character X act in this unusual situation?" and now we want to know, "How would real people act in this unusual situation?"

I'm probably done pontificating on this line of thought. Although I do enjoy using the word "pontificating".