You are what you watch!

Imagine a distant post-apocalyptic future in which a large silver box has just been excavated from the ruins of what was once Los Angeles, a box that contains stack after stack of DVD’s with titles like Survivor, The Bachelor, Biggest Loser, The Swan, Real World, The Apprentice, and Hell’s Kitchen. What might anthropologists conclude about our 21st century society if these shows were their only glimpse into how we lived our lives? Francine Prose ponders this same question in her essay “Voting Democracy off the Island: Reality TV and the Republican Ethos,” in which she asks not only what future anthropologists might deduce, but, “for that matter,” what “contemporary TV-addicted children and adults” might realize if they were to more closely examine their motivation for watching these shows (22). Salman Rushdie, in his article “Reality TV: A Dearth of Talent and the Death of Mortality,” suggests that we need to examine reality television closely because “it tells us things about ourselves,” and even if we don’t think it does, it “ought to,” a claim that suggests that if we merely brush off reality television as a fad, we might be missing something inherently valuable about our nature (16). In her essay, “The Distorting Mirror of Reality Television,” Sarah Coleman suggests that reality television offers a distorted reflection, a “dark view of humanity in the guise of light entertainment,” a consideration that asks us to see who we are in this distorted reflection of our values (19). The question then is: what do we see when we see ourselves in this “dime-store mirror” (“Reality TV” 16)? Whatever the answer to this question might be, the question itself suggests that there is something inherently human about our fascination with r...

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...way and be the winner; that it is okay to betray others because winning is everything; that annoying, conniving, hysterical liars are far more interesting than honest, conscientious, selfless people; and that we are not really a nation of communities but a group of individuals fighting for ourselves—all of which suggests on a very deep level that we feel better when we watch people who we deem to be worse off than we are. The saddest lesson, however, might very well be that we are starved for this kind of inherently cruel entertainment because our own lives seem so much duller in comparison, an observation that suggests that what we can learn from Reality TV does not necessarily only apply to our generation, but to those that came before us and those that will follow—including these hypothetical anthropologists who are watching these shows to better understand us.