Hacker Cinema
Jersey Shore
2009 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 6 seasons
Created by SallyAnn Salsano
Eight people live together as housemates in a vacation home, party, work in the area and compete with each other to win the grand prize.
10 negative1 mixed16 neutralfrom 27 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
28 comments on Hacker News
I am so exhausted with being asked to learn difficult and frankly confusing topics - the fact that it is so hard and so humbling to learn these topics is exactly why everyone is so happy to let AI think about formal programming and I can focus on getting Jersey Shore season 2 loaded into my Plex server. It's the one where Pauly D breaks up with Shelli
I remember a specific case of this happening with a popular CBS tv show "The Unit". I thought it was quite good. Apparently a lot of other people did too because it was one of their most popular shows. But it was cancelled after 3 seasons and replaced with another garbage reality tv show like Jersey Shore, the Kardashians or Survivor or something.
The reason was that the Unit filmed in different locations and had lots of explosions and other things that made it expensive to film.
They decided they could replace it with a show one third as popular that had 1/20th the production cost.
From a business perspective, you can charge one third as much for ads and still come out way ahead because reality garbage costs nothing to make.
> I don't think this is at all "something we all know intuitively".
I really do, in the same way that a satisfying nutritious meal feels different after you're done eating it than a meal of junk food does.
> It also applies to basically any kind of content consumption, including reading books, listening to opera, or watching any kind of cinema.
I was pretty careful to say that not all "content" is like this (though anything that we'd naturally refer to as "content" instead of a "work of art" is probably telling us something). It's certainly the case that there are books, films, shows, and videogames that are meaningful and enriching. There's also 50 Shades of Gray, whatever Michael Bay's latest thing is, Jersey Shore, and Candy Crush.
The form of the media isn't the point, it's the merit of the actual content.
> These don't "engage our entire bodies, senses, and hands", and yet they can be valuable activities that enrich us greatly.
Sure, not every meaningful activity has to tick every box. But it's good to spend your time on things that tick at least some of them. Binge watching completely forgettable superhero series or grinding pointless quests on an MMO are doing little more than fast-forwarding someone towards their death. I of course respect their choice to do that, but my opinion is that choosing to spend signicant time doing that is infantile, just as eating chicken tendies and soda for every meal is.
> At the same time I don't get a lot out of sitting around in a boat for hours; if I want to be left alone to my thoughts I'd rather be on a walk (which I'd argue doesn't necessarily engage my entire body either -- I'm generally lost in thought and have no idea what my body's doing while on a walk).
I only used those specific examples because those are the ones the parent comment used. Find whatever activities are meaningful and rewarding to you. I just hope you're able to find some instead of burning your free time in a mindless fugue of media consumption which is all too easy to do these days.
> I can play video games without brutally murdering a living creature that feels pain, so that's nice.
If you've ever seen me fish, you'd know that harm to fish is rarely involved. In fact, most days there is no fish participation at all.
I met one of the most brilliant people in my life. Smart, passionate about art, culture, politics. Brilliant student, top of her class from elementary through college. Fluent (as in certified) C2 in English and German. Terrific career as a public servant in foreign politics already in her late 20s.
She would never, ever, miss a single episode of a “reality” about dating in tv, a show famous in Italy as “trash tv”. It was unwatchable, worse than Jersey shore.
I asked her why such an intelligent and smart person couldn’t miss an episode of something so terrible and lame and she answered me “I know it’s awful, but for an entire hour I’m able to be lobotomized and not have a single thought, I can completely detach from reality and relax”.
My current SO does the same with Instagram. Whenever she needs to detach from her thoughts she zombifies on Instagram. Might be cats or fashion bloggers but she tunes out completely and she does that intentionally knowing that’s the effect it has on her.
How about educating kids on the proper use of such powerful tools, including the concepts of FLOSS (and, in general, how to question and think critically)? TV is not the problem, having more kids watching Jersey Shore rather than some good documentaries is.
You're talking about a world where Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, The Jersey Shore, and gameshows where you pick your spouse from a group of strangers are hit television shows. I think you may have tastes which are outside of the mainstream.
Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that American movies have had to be more generic in their themes and dialog to be easier to translate/localize for the Chinese. Ghostbusters and Deadpool were not eligible for China's market because of their supernatural and otherwise offensive content, so it's not hard to believe that moviemakers will have to work harder to justify such content [2].
As an American, seeing these examples is still kind of amusing to me in a karmic way. I assume whatever annoyance or alienation I feel is just a small bit of how the rest of the world has felt the past 50 years, having to regularly adapt to and adopt strange influences and demands because they were popular in America (Sorry about "Jersey Shore", high fructose corn syrup, the backlash against MSG, and the cocaine trade).
[0] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-china-blame-global-avocado-shortage.html
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/09/news/economy/butter-shortage-europe/index.html
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/did-you-catch-the-ways-hollywood-pandered-to-china-this-year
The "sensible argument" is that ads allow small "content creators" to "monetize" their content.
I think this is mostly a fallacy. I know of many developers, bloggers, musicians, film makers, etc who put their content out into the public domain because that's what they want to do. There are "monetizing" opportunities above and beyond advertising that seem to work well, but the lowest common denominator, and by inference, the lowest form of media, are generally ad-driven.
People argue with "yeah, but what about game of thrones and silicon valley". I reply with "yeah, but what about keeping up with the kardashians, jersey shore and the latest CSI franchise".
The gold / dross ration is 1 / 99. We can easily lose most of the ad driven content in the world without losing entertaining content.
I may be a statistical aberration though. I'm obviously not the "target audience".
Reminds me of an episode of Bones:
a: These are what are known as "Guidos.
b: (chuckles) Yeah, Sweetie, I don't think they actually like to be called that.
a: But they do.
a: That's what they call themselves, although interestingly, not all Guidos are of Italian descent.
b: Really?
a: While the styles and mannerisms are based on Italian-American tropes, the Guidos can be of any ethnic background.
a: They gather at the Jersey Shore.
a: The male bonding is near homoerotic.
a: The friends or "bros" are more important to them than family.
b: Right.
b: And how do you know all of this?
a: I stumbled across a compelling documentary about them.
a: The anthropologist in me was fascinated.
And the weight-training rats, although they were much stronger at the end of the experiment than they had been at the start, showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis.
This phenomenon was deeply studied and illustrated in the 'Jersey Shore' series documentary
>At this point, we (HN community) are just treating this like a season of Jersey Shore.
well, cabin fever until the 3rd season of "SV" is out. In the meantime have to survive on daily ration of reality show like "guess whose horn is just a plastic cone", with today episode featuring Theranos.
I remember reading that Netflix practically ignores what you rate shows when generating recommendations, that using what you actually watch is much more accurate. You may have gave A Clockwork Orange 5 stars, but you binge watches Jersey Shore.
I imagine the same applies here. You might say height isn't a factor, but only picked men over 6'.
One cannot always choose one's friends and environments. There are indeed friend groups that would not be available to someone who has not watched Star Wars, or Jersey Shore, or what have you.
There's no one item, no short list, of essential works that define the threshold between effective and ineffective cultural participation. But there is a compounding social effect for each movie/song/book/etc. someone doesn't know. Each additional water cooler conversation that one cannot join, and each additional movie reference missed, is one step further away from those friends. At some point, people stop trying to communicate with someone who doesn't understand them.
Beyond mere socialization and entertainment, popular culture forms the behavioral and memetic vocabulary with which people communicate. As an example of how isolating cultural non-participation can be, consider how difficult it is for escapees from fundamentalist religious communes to integrate into society. That is the extreme end of a spectrum, and each decision not to participate in one's local popular culture moves one closer to that extreme.
I'm not saying piracy is right; I'm saying that the choice not to consume is inextricably linked to a whole lot of other choices, including whether to participate in society at all.
Given all that, it is unconscionable for Hollywood et al. to wield the amount of power they have demonstrated in the provisions in leaked TPP drafts and other laws and treaties.
Channel 4 is a "public service" channel only in the sense that it was one of the first four channels to come into existence at a time when the quid pro quo for having a broadcast licence was that challenging, worthy, high-quality programmes were broadcast.
Today, Channel 4 is still technically a PSB, but it's not and has never been "non-commercial" - it shows adverts and makes profits just like any other commercial channel.
Calling "Benefits Street" a documentary would be like saying that Jersey Shore or The Osbournes was a documentary. It's not.
As Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, asked in a September article for the MIT Technology Review: “If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?”
Maybe popular TV shows like Jersey Shore should contain public service announcements like "Snooki says: reading is fun!"
Or maybe we need more on-screen text in games like Call of Duty & Halo. For example, you can't complete a particular objective unless you figure out that a paragraph of text tells you to look up a "code word" from page 6 of a real book like The Lorax.
Schools and teachers aren't our problem. If parents and kids aren't intrinsically motivated to learn, how can you force them to?
I hope that more American parents will convince their kids to take education seriously, or else many other countries (with access to American online courses) will eventually surpass us.
A lot of people who deny watching this stuff watch it.
Big Brother US just finished its 14th season. Jersey Shore is in season 6. Real Housewives Of Orange County going into season 7. Somebody's out there watching it.
Having said that, this does look particularly light weight. The appeal of Silicon Valley in the tv sense is the money, but these will be people without money. The promo makes it look like a show about wannabes on the party circuit. I guess that might work, but if I were doing that kinda show I'd aim at Hollywood or maybe NY.
Wondering how much these people value their time is like wondering how much the Jersey Shore cast values the soil quality in New Jersey. It's a reality TV show.
reposting my comment from that post
I find the show distasteful but it is as accurate a portrayal of Silicon Valley as Jersey Shore is of that particular geo/demographic. In a way, this shows you how mainstream Silicon Valley now is - instead of just being portrayed as nerds and VCs, this shows that there exists many, many flavors of people/lifestyle here in the Bay Area.
Let's be clear - this is a Bravo show, not a Ken Burns documentary. A realistic portrayal of this place would have a bunch of people staring in front of their text editors all day. Or attending meetings and whiteboarding things. Not exactly riveting television.
Hyperbole much? She is an entertainment content producer. She is producing entertainment. She is not making a documentary. And only idiots and people looking for a cheap joke really think jersey shore is an actual representation of new jersey... It's more a characterization of long island!
> What do Path, Hipstamatic, Highlight, Hipster (yes, that’s an app), and Color have in common? They create absolutely nothing of value.
This is like complaining Jersey Shore adds nothing of value to people's lives. Sure, it doesn't, but it's not supposed to. It's entertainment. Just because people are easily entertained and advertisers will pay for those eyeballs, doesn't mean it's not a financially viable business.
Some apps solve problems and are useful. Some apps entertain (solving a different problem - boredom). Confusing the two purposes leads to posts like these.
(For the record, I completely agree that there are a lot of useless apps out there, but how is that different from there being a ton of useless TV shows, movies and video games out there? If you don't want to contribute to that because you think it's a poor use of time, then don't, but it doesn't mean that there's not a market for it and that there isn't money to be made there).
The philosophy was that people use twitter to convey their rational conceptions of things (140 character explanation of their thoughts) while there was no medium for telling the world what you're feeling and why. Since people love posting their thoughts on twitter, we imagined there would be a market for those who want to let everyone know what's causing their emotions.
From the about page:
Moodstir is where you give the world a snapshot of your emotions. Tell the world you're [frustrated] because of [traffic], or search [Jersey Shore] to see the variety of moods the popular TV show causes people to share.
Moodstir is where you give the world a snapshot of your emotions.
Tell everyone you're [frustrated] because of [traffic], or search [Jersey Shore] to see the variety of moods the popular TV show causes people to share.
Let me know what you think, any comments/advice is appreciated!
What would really be the reaction if, in protest over - lets say legislation written by lobbyists from Silicon Valley that would make any variation of SOPA illegal - the big media companies had a one day blackout. Why aren't they considering this? Would people flip out because the new episode of Jersey Shore was supposed to be on? Would they understand the motivations and join in protest by contacting legislators?
Wikipedia is not to blame any more than MTV is to blame for Jersey Shore - they are both simply catering content that reflects how their audience wants to expend attention.
Looking at the numbers for perez hilton, farmville, facebook, television, porn, etc - paints a picture that the average mass consumer does not consider scientific knowledge to be notable.. or the inventors of this knowledge.
I blame Edward Bernays. Watch the BBC documentary 'The Century of Self' which provides a historical context for why the amygdala of the typical consumer suckles all the attention, while the neo-cortex sits waiting like the runt of the litter with only a vague notion of scientific knowledge present in daily life.
Ok, but isn't that difference in birthdate orthogonal to whether the "intelligence" is a result of nature or nurture? (Don't forget that when you have children you're not just propagating genes, but memes as well. Kids raised on Jersey Shore will tune in to Ow, My Balls!)
I don't recall the movie taking a stance towards nature. In fact, the moral of the whole story is to try to solve problems, and the great speech at the end envisioned a time where people cared whose ass it was and why it was farting. These are messages about cultural priorities, not genetic limitations.
You could take it a step further and turn your startup into a reality TV show. Make it something like Jersey Shore mixed with the Apprentice. If you add enough drama and sexual tension it wouldn't really have to be about anything to make it interesting.
If you can name all the stars of Jersey Shore and talk about the latest episode, that's something you should be incredibly embarrassed about.
I look at shows like Firefly -- any decent scifi really -- the masses aren't interested, people like me will only do on-demand (even if it is downloaded etc), and will buy merchandising. This can't work in most current network models. But in something like we are discussing, there is room for it be profitable -- maybe not insanely so -- but profitable nonetheless. This is why I think "good content" will flourish in such situations. People will still watch jersey shore, but people like me can get good content too.
An interesting thing has been going on lately anyway -- there are a lot more 12 episode seasons. And a lot more summer seasons. Content producers are starting to experiment. The syfy show Sanctuary started out as with a "pay for webisodes" model. Things are starting to move in interesting ways already.