A.J. Miceli is turning up the temperature on reality television Wednesday night.

The Gannon professor, and this editor’s career mentor, is presenting the lecture “Reality TV:  Meaner, Edgier, Nastier” at the Children’s Theatre area in the Blasco Memorial Library downtown tonight (Wed. 10/7/2009) at 7:00. The event is part of the One Book, One Erie and The Big Read campaign, described by it’s promoters as the following:

The idea of One Book, One Erie is to encourage all of Erie County to read the same book at the same time and then come together to discuss it. This year, we will again be reading  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury in conjunction with The Big Read.

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. The Big Read brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.

A.J. creates the bridge between the book everyone is reading and the impact of modern media on the current culture. He’ll start with a history lesson:

Like much of the dystopian literature of the 1940′s and 50′s, Fahrenheit 451 reflects the fear that the powerful new electronic media could be abused by a fascist society to control the under-educated brainwashed masses.  As science fiction, Fahrenheit 451 predicts innovations like earbud radios and big screen TVs.  We’ll start by looking at the TV environment of the early 1950′s and some of the science that Ray Bradbury surely would have known about.  From there we’ll launch into an investigation of the roots of today’s Reality TV from game shows to live car chases.  After all, it’s not that far a jump from “Queen For A Day” to “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”.  Along the way we’ll also look at some of the reasons we watch Reality TV.

In F451 they were scared of books. We have nothing to worry about with Regis…or do we?