chico haas  07-16-2003
11:50 AM ET (US)
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Why reality shows are popular:
1. They're cheap.
2. We're voyeurs.
3. Spontaneous emotion is good TV. There is no difference between a game show winner's tears and those of the dead child's mother.
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Patrick Gregston 07-16-2003
10:20 AM ET (US)
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I agree, full observation isn't around the corner- there isn't the bandwidth- goverment would have to be over 50% of the society. No the real lesson is that when you have a camera present, you can be aware that you can make the show yours or not. Like videoconferencing, do you take the circumstance to your advantage or do you destroy the communication by not looking in the camera when you speak to the other side?
All that is on television is arbitrated, by the frame alone.
There is no 'reality' on tv or in the movies. No documentary ever has 'reality'. Good stuff gives you a sense of what reality was/is, and bad stuff twists it but neither is Reality.
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Brian Carnell 07-15-2003
10:35 PM ET (US)
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"Because, magically, weirdly, just in time, they are teaching us what it means to be watched, all the time, and have all of your actions and interactions not only observed by millions of anonymous strangers, but analyzed, judged, and preserved forever."
First, I really like reality shows. Yes a lot of them are crap, as with any genre, but there are also a few well worth watching.
Second, and more importantly, the above description is just dead wrong in a very important way. Reality shows are heavily mediated -- you're not seeing some objective, neutral view of actions but rather a highly selective presentation that results in fiction just as often as any traditional fictional drama or sitcom. These things are more heavily edited to fit the script than a 60 Minutes interview.
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aun_respiro 07-15-2003
09:49 PM ET (US)
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"And this is a lesson that we, especially in the United States, desperately need to learn, because it is about to happen to all of us."
Oh, come on. This is such a load. Where is the evidence that we are to be subjected to constant Big Brother-type surveillance and tracking? As soon as the government even inched in that direction - with TIA - the program was immediately denounced and defunded by Congress. Did you read Lileks the other day? The above-quoted sentence is a YWP - a "Yeah, Whatever" point. It's a hard-left canard that bears no resemblance to reality, and causes that ~70% of your audience that is not hard-left to roll their eyes and move on, knowing already what the rest of the article is going to say.
A "growing and soon ubiquitous wireless network"? Tell that to my Powerbook which can't get a wireless signal one floor down from my base station. If he's talking about the cell or pager networks, they're hardly ubiquitous (look up the damn word) and privately owned. Not a threat.
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