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From Personality to Persona
Big as reality TV is, it's also just a facet of a larger shift in popular culture: changing attitudes toward privacy and self-expression. If you grew up with reality TV and the Internet, your default setting is publicity, not privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, recently argued that sharing has become the "social norm."
Zuckerberg was defending a controversial change in Facebook's privacy settings to make the company's trove of user information more valuable. Still, he has hundreds of millions of users and their college beer-bong photos proving his point every day. Facebook's competitor Twitter is a worldwide agora of valuable information and TMI. You can make your tweets private if you want, but why would you?
Thus comes what you might call the realitization of reality: the evolution of once private, or at least obscure, acts into performance. The diary becomes the blog. The home-movie collection becomes the YouTube channel. The résumé becomes the public search-result page.
And the personality becomes the persona. Every time you sign up for a new social-networking service, you make decisions about, literally, who you want to be. You package yourself — choose an avatar, pick a name, state your status — not unlike a storyteller creating a character or a publicist positioning a client. You can be professional on LinkedIn, flippant on Facebook and epigrammatic on Twitter. What's more, each of these representations can be very different and yet entirely authentic. Like a reality producer in a video bay, you edit yourself to fit the context.
In the workplace, for more than a decade, job-insecure Americans have been told to cultivate "the brand called you." Decide what your strengths are. Focus on your core competencies. Be aware of the bullet points of your identity. The message of both business and leisure today is, Distinguish between the actual and the for-public-consumption self.
Put all these factors together, and reality TV's endless stream of candidates seems inevitable. Every winter, American Idol's audition rounds attract a deluge of self-created characters, who have the formula for getting on national TV down to a science. "I'm the crazy accordion lady/ This is my song," yowls a blue-haired young woman cradling a squeeze-box. The advanced descendants of the costumed screwballs who tried to get Monty Hall's attention on Let's Make a Deal, today's reality performance artists put on virtual costumes — the Bitch, the Horndog, the Drama Queen — to get noticed. In reality TV, privacy and even likability are commodities that can be traded for something more valuable.
Which is? Reality TV is now a valid career choice. The New York Times estimated that at any given time, there are 1,000 people on air as reality TV stars. (That may not seem like a huge number, but compared with, let's say, full-time TV critics, it's quite a healthy field.) For a few talented individuals — say, Idol's Kelly Clarkson or the cooks of Top Chef — this has made possible actual real-life opportunity. Jennifer Hudson lost on Idol but won an Oscar as an actress. Elisabeth Hasselbeck went from eating bugs on Survivor to chewing out Joy Behar on The View.
And for others, it has enabled a life of lucrative famousness for famousness. Members of the cast of The Hills, for instance, reportedly earn up to $90,000 an episode; the Real Housewives, about $30,000. Hills star Heidi Montag has released an album, launched a clothing line, even, God help us, co-written a book. Co-star Audrina Patridge at one point received $10,000 to party at a nightclub for two hours. Reality star Kim Kardashian reportedly nets $10,000 for each product she endorses on Twitter. How much money did you make in the last 30 seconds?
Will Offend for Fame
Of course, you don't reach that level of success without working for it. Kardashian, for instance, didn't get her show until a sex tape of her and an R&B singer became public. Which is another lesson of reality TV: outrageousness pays.
And the more reality TV there is, the more outrageous you have to be to break out. Nadya Suleman, or Octomom, parlayed a horrifyingly dangerous multiple birth into a reality special, ending up — like her apparent model, Angelina Jolie — on the cover of Star magazine, showing off "My New Bikini Body! How I Did It!" Richard Heene convinced the world that his 6-year-old son was hurtling toward his death in a balloon. But as the veteran of ABC's Wife Swap knew, the show he was pitching — eccentric storm-chasing scientist and his wacky family — wouldn't even raise an eyebrow on a cable schedule.