How reality TV can ruin real lives
Suppose, 10 years ago, a young woman fell to day-dreaming that she should really have been a pop star. Now the wannabe-Madonna auditions for a TV talent show, where her unsuitability for a musical career allows the celebrity judges some easy crowd-pleasing put-downs.
Recently, in landmark examples of the way that new technology has changed our lives, Dave Pollard in England is being divorced by his wife because she caught his graphic stand-in shagging a computerized beauty on Second Life. And Paula Goodspeed was found dead, apparently by suicide, outside the Los Angeles home of one of the judges who voted her off American Idol.
It's more than possible that Pollard would have divorced and Goodspeed died even if computers had remained a business tool and television stuck to dramatizing classic novels. All inventions can be misused; the railway network should not be closed down because people throw themselves under trains. But even so, this coincidence of a virtual-reality divorce and a reality-television suicide feels symbolic of modern life.
