As odious as reality TV shows are, they have the signal virtue of showing us how miserable life is in the absence of any privacy and ubiquitous surveillance.
So why reality shows? Reality shows are dead cheap. You think a million dollar prize is expensive? Each member of the cast of Friends that every night. To be competitive, a show like Survivor or Idiots in a Box hardly needs to beat "regular" shows to turn a profit. And, it turns out, that people will watch this stuff in huge quantities. (There are a couple interesting potential explanations for that, but I'll limit myself to the observation that sticking a bunch of people off the street with no special training or, apparantly, personality still produces a more interesting show with better dialogue than 90% of what the networks turn out. "Perhaps," mull the networks, "the problem is that the audience wants higher definition signals." Yeah, perhaps.) These shows thrive on feeding a never-ending appetite for more and more intimate/embarassing/private/dreadful behavior, and this drives an arms race to the bottom (as if there were a bottom). So why I am heralding them as being so important?
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. 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.
