OPINION> Commentary
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OPINION> Commentary
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How reality TV can ruin real lives
By Mark Lawson (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-20 07:49 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. What unites the two cases is that they are part of a fantasy industry, offering escape routes from reality that prove less safe than advertised. Second Life, for example, is a kids' dressing-up box for alleged grown-ups. The case of the couple separated by the husband's online romance starkly illustrates the transformative appeal of such games. Photographic evidence shows that, when Dave Pollard and Amy Taylor created their avatars - "Dave Barmy" and "Laura Skye" - they took the opportunity, as most players do, to raise their height and halve their weight. But, cruelly, even the understudy Amy did not prove enough for the alternative Dave.
Indeed, given that the real Dave and Amy are reported to have met originally in an Internet chat room, they may have claims to be an ultimate modern couple: their union beginning and ending through a technological possibility that was not available to their parents. The Pollard/Barmy case, though, reveals the flaw in Second Life's claim to function as a safe space for fantasies. Luckily, Amy has now replaced both Daves with a bloke she met on a war game website, although you have to wonder if she's inviting further trouble. No one is saying that courtship should go back to chaperones and dance cards but fantasy universes seem a particularly risky place to pick partners. As with the Second Life divorce, the American Idol death is also not a simple matter of cause and effect: the judges, in rejecting an unlikely pretender, were not directly responsible for this outcome. But the makers of these shows need to reflect on whether they have underestimated the potential consequences of creating a stage on which fantasies and delusions can be played out. When reality TV began to degenerate from its genuinely interesting beginnings, I wrote that the logic of the genre led inexorably to suicide or homicide, and was accused of exaggeration. But, as the cruelty of this kind of TV has increased there has been a growing sense of the vulnerable being thrown as meat to the ambitious in the cause of entertainment. Two buzz phrases of recent years have been "reality check" and "get real". Recent strange cases, though, suggest that popular culture needs to take heed of both instructions. The industrialization of day-dreaming is ruining real lives. The Guardian (China Daily 11/20/2008 page9) |
