Lack of culture or lack of power?

Through Raphael's reading about reality TV our group was able to understand that reality TV is not a lack of culture or creativity. Reality TV has emerged from budget cuts and the creation of new technology such as VCRs which allowed people to record programming and skip the commercials. If someone can skip all the commercials during a TV show then it would only make sense for the companies paying for these ads to pay less. This of course led to program production budget cuts. These budget cuts lead to reality TV because it is cheaper to produce. This seems to tie in with what Marx says. Our society is driven by a higher power but we believe we have control. In our society that higher power may be advertisers. Due to the fact that we cannot pay for programming we are watching reality TV shows like Jersey Shore, Tosh.0, Bad Girls Club, or The Real Housewives of New Jersey. This is important because people believe that reality TV makes others think we are bad, uneducated, lacking culture,but the truth is that we are only seeing an emergence of these reality TV shows because it is cheaper.