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Then there's the World Wide Web, the invention that puts the "me" in "medium." No sooner was the Internet opened to home users than its essential text became the personal home page, a document dedicated to the fact that its author exists: here I am, here is my dog, here is my story. And that was before 24-hr. webcams enabled their users to broadcast live feeds from their offices and boudoirs, even from inside their refrigerators (see accompanying story). With so many willing, casual exhibitionists among us, it's less surprising that VTV happened than that it didn't happen sooner.
Is this narcissism or catharsis? It's hard to tell the difference nowadays, but several VTV veterans explain their decisions to bare all in the language of therapy and personal growth. Survivor contestant Sonja Christopher, 63, was already a survivor--of breast cancer--and signed on as a way of moving on. "I had been through a lot in the past two years," she says. "Following this fantasy, doing this crazy thing, was a way to try to heal myself. It was a survival instinct." "I felt suffocated and trapped in the life I was in," says The Real World's Julie. "I certainly did a lot of growing up." Others, like Bowler, compare the experience to adventure travel. "Other people want to climb Mount Everest, but I've always wanted to go back and forward in time," she says.
And the potential money and fame generally don't hurt. That was the explicit draw of Making the Band, the ABC reality show that chronicles the auditioning and training of aspiring boy band O-Town. "It was the sweetest," says Trevor Penick, 20, of getting picked for the show. "Just like The Real World, you know?" Indeed. Some seasons, The Real World has seemed like a postgraduate program for aspiring actors, models and singers, with more than 35,000 applicants a year. "The ideal candidate [for a VTV show] would be a strong narcissist," says Atlanta psychologist Robert Simmermon, a fellow in the division of media psychology of the American Psychological Association. "Narcissism is not all a bad thing. It's kind of like cholesterol. You have good and bad narcissism, and you have to have a healthy mix."
In Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler argued that celebrity culture had created a universal lust for the camera, and he sees these series as a case in point. "Reality has become the greatest entertainment of all," he says. "It's symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that all of life is entertainment." It's a grand argument, appealing to our now conditioned distrust of the fame machine. But it's an easy one to take too far. In fact, most of us don't want to, in Gabler's words, "get to the other side of the glass," not this way. That's partly why we goggle at these shows, dumb struck.