Week Fourteen: Science Fiction Parody and Satire

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I didn't know that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio broadcast, I always thought they started as books. Douglas Adam's story has become quite the cult classic--I think everyone knew that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything was the number 42 at my school by the time we were in our sophomore year of high school. That being said, not all of us knew exactly where that came from, although I had an idea.

Like seemingly everything from this semester, I wasn't very exposed to Hitchhiker's Guide. I never saw any of the film adaptations, although I do vaguely remember watching a trailer for the one starring Martin Freeman. Listening to the radio adaptation was pretty entertaining, although there were times that I got lost because I wasn't reading or watching anything.

I think that the humor, however, was best served in this audio format. I'm not big on podcasts or radio shows, although I did listen to the Welcome to Nightvale series for a short period of time. I like that, with this format, you're allowed to visualize what's happening yourself instead of relying on visual cues from film. The humor of the script was also well portrayed.

Idiocracy

I really enjoyed Idiocracy, especially as an Advertising Design major. The idea that a dystopian society is run by advertising, commercialism, and straight up stupidity is honestly not that far from a lot of the research and planning I do in class. There's a new method of media planning and buying that has been in the works for the past year known as "programmatic" media, which uses big data mining trends to define individuals based on their online shopping habits. From there, ads can be placed on a mass of sites that the individual is expected to frequent, making the consumerism more accessible than ever and the actual strategy and planning part of advertising slowly irrelevant when up against data mining.

There's always the long-running joke that every company is owned by another larger company, as seen in Idiocracy's "Brawndo" irrigating the crops and buying out the FDA, FCC, and USDA. The popular show Parks and Rec also makes fun of this in their final season which is set in 2017, looking at brands like Chipotle, Exxon, and Verizon merging into one giant company as well. But even here and now, that's happening everywhere. In advertising there are realistically 3 major "Umbrella Companies" that oversee major advertising agencies.

So maybe someday what we see as parody and satire will "devolve" into the dystopian society of Idiocracy. As this class comes to the end, all I can say is so long, and thanks for all the fish.