Nerve (Spoiler Warning)

After reading Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I have become more aware of how accurate his argument is in some ways. I have just watched the newly released movie Nerve, which is about a young girl named Vee who decides to participate in an illegal online dare game. The participants of the game is categorized into players and watchers; players who carry out the dares and stream them live, gaining money in return while watchers request dares. The game starts to get serious and risky when the stakes of winning become higher, forcing players to perform dangerous dares for the sake of continuing the game. Throughout the story, it is mentioned that the game has no servers, and is run by the people that participate in either watching or playing the game. I then drew the connection to Postman’s argument that television and the media has a negative effect on society by demanding a certain type of content. That content being entertainment.

Nerve is a game that functions solely off of entertainment for the viewers. Blinded by that entertainment the viewers put the players in dangerous life or death situations. (SPOILER!) In the end, each watcher realized that they had participated in the murder of a person, all for the sake of entertainment, leading them to sign off the game shutting it down. It took the death of someone to bring that self awareness. Self awareness made people realize they had taken entertainment too far. This leads me to Postman’s important point which suggests that we have to become aware of what television is, so that we can control it rather than let it control us. We cannot let the media, entertainment, or any form of technology cloud our judgement from doing the right thing, nor is technology a scapegoat for the problems WE have control over in our life. The question is, do we have the nerve to prevent entertainment and technology from ruling our lives?