(especially the idol, the rockstar, and the dance competitions, but also oprah and dr.phil)

1. people gradually get used to being on camera, and you get to watch it happen. what really seems to happen is that people on tv figure out who they are in relation to the people present and in relation to that other interactant - the camera, the mass. so you watch them go through different social situations and, even when the plotline of a show is scripted, you watch them reveal themselves in little unscriptable bits of phrases and gestures.

2. you also watch people struggle between ’staying true to who they are’ and ‘growing’. you see a lot of people who don’t take advice get sent home. And a lot of people miss what was the key bit of advice, or offer performances that are too fearful and restrained, or too fake and strange, and get sent home. Each time this happens, it can suggest something potentially useful about tactics for your own life. Ways of thinking about being the best, and what that means within your own value matrix, and what it entails.

3.gradually the competition gets narrowed down to the most talented, most experienced, most intense competitors and the elimination process feels like a passing whim about who, at that moment of performance, was least genuine and gave the least broadly loveable performance. I like to try and figure out who a performance is connecting with if its not connecting with me. i like to imagine where i am at each passing moment in relation to the mainstream. I like to try and see if the mass is getting something i don’t get.

(last night i watched the final for canadian idol. i think rex did a better job, and i don’t mind if there’s guys at the top for a while. it’ll just challenge some hitherto too-cool canadian girls to get out there. but we’ll see if canada agreed with me.)

4. sometimes ‘reality tv’ producers are able to keep every hint of the actual politics and contemporary events that make up reality out of a show, and that’s interesting to notice, but not as interesting as when the competitors draw in that whole other world with a small reference. when they do you feel layers of mediation colliding. How the contestant saw the event, how i saw the event, and how i’m now seeing the contestant all create a momentary stutter and the crowd will always cheer.

5. in times of crisis other types of reality-based tv, like oprah or dr.phil, can make visible the individual lives and stories that are suffering in countless unique and complex ways. and they can extend the act of helping that seems to disapear after i enter my credit card number and click send to donate. In a way, when they are really thorough, intelligent, humble and good I will allow myself to imagine them as extensions of the best in myself. Saying and doing for people what I wish i could say.

6. People like Oprah and Dr. Phil could be considered emergent properties of human connectivity and complexity. People empowered by vast media networks and corporate relationships and rigourously watchful viewers can wear, for a while, a super human mantle. And it’s interesting to see what they must do to continuously earn it, and how people each individually choose to give it to them- when they feel, for example, that Dr. Phil’s language, gestures, help are all perfectly well-intentioned and genuine.

7. These talk-show type ambassadors of yet another kind of ‘reality’ or perspective on it are fascinating to watch because every time they engage in another interaction there is the possibility they will fail. Fail to be interesting, to hit the right note, to be loveable, to be helpful. They are produced and prepped and pre-interviewed for success, of course, but if the pre-packed-ness and polish shows too much the viewers won’t buy into it for long.

8. i think they’re facinating because i often think that they represent the future of our governance. there will be more pressure to interact publicly, to debate publicly, to be responsible to the public as pieces of fakery and distortion continue to become visible in the political sphere (as they did here with the sponsorship scandal.) And as the judges in the supreme court are replaced with younger members who are unafraid of computers, and sense there might be a democratizing effect in allowing a little more mediation into their courts, we will go through a riotous political time and come out with leaders who are able to withstand the challenges of complex economics, policy, and science in the bright light of the public gaze. they will be like tv personalities, but in a much more intense way then the reagan’s or arnie’s, because they will also have to answer for themselves and speak for themselves online.

9. i like reality tv because i think of it as a gauge on where we are on our way to the future, and offers small hints on what the future we are building will be like. And because it gives a little sense of what we are like now in different places and from different angles.

10. i like ’so you think you can dance’ because i’m totally intrigued by the success of movement on tv- dance and television seem like two methods for communicating that are meant for each other.

11. and i love to see the technicalities of ballroom, say, as they are exposed by a ballroom dancer trying to shed her perfected habits to learn a whole new thing. i love to see domains of expertise pooling, interacting, crossing over, becomeing hybidized and then becomeing unique again. it’s like watching people learn how to speak eachother’s languages.
i also love that mp3 phone commercial where everyone dances together to the different songs they hear on their headphones and their stamping makes a unified, wicked beat. but that’s not reality tv.