Next or The Real Housewives?

In my previous blog I talked about how we don't know what's real and what isn't. That is, philosophically. Now, we will see this topic from another point of view: reality TV. It is exactly the same issue Descartes posed, just that instead we have Kim Kardashian, girls and sweet sixteen parties and Flavor Flav. With reality shows, we are not certain if the material presented is actually real.

Oh come on, like you don't know who New York is. 

"I don't think our viewers necessarily differentiate between what's scripted and what's not. Our primary goal is to make a show that is compelling." (110) That's how reality tv directors think our small brains work. That's how stupid they think we are. Sad truth, that's how we are. We don't actually care how real a reality tv show is as long as it has fights and catches our attention. The worst thing is, these shows don't actually depict reality. They just show us, as Shields said, that they are "worse than what [we actually] experience" and "what someone else would do if things turned really bad." (107). And...we dig it. 

The article Brief Lives by Kate Salter from The Guardian talks about a guy who synthesizes a random person's story and writes it in the back of a postcard. He seems to feel so special because people open to him with all these stories, but how does he know they are true? How can he tell what is real and what isn't? He doesn't know who he's dealing with; never met the person and probably never will. That's why it isn't weird when someone talks to him about the presence of aliens, he directly assumes they're crazy, lonely or really desperate. There is no guarantee that there is always certainty in the tales told to us. But since they are completely external to us, at least in this case, we can't judge. Therefore, we go ahead and choose to believe exactly what they told us. 

Reality is in the eye of the beholder, the public. And we distort reality according to how much we want it to be real or not. Unconsciously, we believe what we choose to and adjust it to our own perception. But, have in mind that we also tell what we want to.