Reality television. You either love it or hate it. Some of it is staged, some of it looks legitimate, and some of looks stupid. But huge amounts of people are watching it and I've been thinking about why it appeals to so many. My first thought was to compare reality television to novels and movies. Maybe we don't care whether reality television is staged because we love the escape and the emotion that it can invoke within us.
As much as my first thought is probably true, I think the answer is probably deeper than that. If we care about fictional characters, how much more attractive is the possibility of following the lives of real life people?
Recently, while flipping through one of Henri Nouwen's books called Reaching Out, something he said clicked. He said that every day he got on a subway train and everybody on board did their best to try to ignore everybody else. They were buried in newspapers, books, and magazines, trying to avoid eye contact with each other. At the same time, Nouwen said, billboards on the subway walls had messages that invited him to interact with people. The faces on the billboards all smiled and offered a sense of concern about him and his needs.
In our haste to secure our privacy and to keep to ourselves, we've cut ourselves off from old fashioned community. The community that we have today is structured. We have a community of people we interact with at work or school. We have a community of people we interact with at church. We have a community of friends we interact with on the weekends. But interacting with strangers has become something to avoid.
Along came reality television offered us the chance to see into the lives of people we don't know. We supposedly get to see how they react in real life settings and somehow that seems to temporarily fill the need that we all have for community. But watching or reading about people involved in community can never take the place of getting involved in one.
