On the face of it, with an Apprentice host in the White House, reality TV and plain old reality appear to be merging. Does this imply that, unable to compete with the dyspeptic clatter from the White House, reality TV has now run its course? Or can we expect it, for the same reasons, to grow ever more extreme?
Why care? Because the question as thus far framed is upside-down. Like Facebook “friends”, the term reality TV is a quirk of the English language. Television can never accurately reflect a reality outside itself, because – a little like Schrödinger’s cat – the moment you train a camera on human experience, you change it. The late John Berger made this point forcefully in his book Ways of Seeing, when he included an image of a woman cradling her dead husband on a beach after a shipwreck yet, even in her grief, reflexively smiling for the photographer.
In truth there has never been anything usefully understood as “reality TV”. From the launch of Big Brother at the end of the 1990s to its current incarnation, we’ve been watching not reality TV, but TV reality – a qualitatively distinct category, with a different emotional language. Given that by the second decade of the 21st century, most of us were carrying not just mini TVs but TV studios around in our pockets, it can hardly be surprising that the fluid mores, conventions and epistemological assumptions of TV reality should have come to replace our old, more rigid 20th-century ones.
But of course we’re not exchanging like for like. It’s been noted before that TV reality is all about emotional engagement – yet such discussions often assume a false dichotomy between rationality and the emotions. As the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky points out, emotions are not of themselves unintelligent or irrational. To take a simple example, anger is a highly effective means of shutting down empathy; a necessary and wholly rational response to danger, among other things. In short, our emotional responses are part of a toolkit, developed over many millennia to negotiate an environment that didn’t change much.
But we now have a problem. Technology has thrown up a range of electronic tools that allow our painstakingly evolved, highly nuanced emotions to be tweaked or manipulated at dizzying speed and scale. And with screens and machines developing so much faster than our ability to evolve defences against their misuse, we find ourselves backed into a corner.
We’re so used to this state of affairs, and so preoccupied with adapting to the constant novelty of new technology, that most of us no longer see this process occurring – all we see is its befuddling consequences.
Will this be a terrible thing in the long run? It’s hard to know. Robert Galinsky, founder of the New York Reality TV School (the graduation diploma from which is my most prized qualification), is a font of counterintuitive views on this subject. He has a rosier perspective of “the crossover of reality TV into our everyday lives and activities” than I do, enthusing that “Trump has taken the genre and brought it back to its roots – real life”.
Except that, as far as I can see, there are no roots to return to here: “reality TV” is a misleading term for something that never really existed, and whether we like it or not the TV reality it exemplified is now just reality. This is not a fad or a passing phase and will not end soon.
The best we can do is get used to it and become as fluent in the TV reality language as possible; to become as constantly conscious of its tropes and factual-emotional convolutions as we can, so that we may control it rather than the other way round. Of this we are perfectly capable, but as with any new language, we need to be attentive.
