Imagine a distant post-apocalyptic future where a large silver box has just been excavated from the ruins of what was once Los Angeles, a box containing stacks and stacks of DVDs with titles like Survivor, The Bachelor, The Biggest Loser, Swan, The Real World, The Apprentice and Hell's Kitchen. What might anthropologists conclude about our 21st century society if these shows were their only glimpse into how we live our lives? Francine Prose reflects on the same question in her essay “Voting Democracy off the Island: Reality TV and the Republican Ethos,” in which she asks not only what future anthropologists might deduce, but, “for that matter,” what “contemporaries dependent on TV children and adults” could realize this if they more closely examined their motivation for watching these shows (22). Salman Rushdie, in his article “Reality TV: A Dearth of Talent and the Death of Mortality,” suggests that we need to examine reality television carefully because it “tells us things about ourselves,” and even if we don't think it does, "it should ,” a statement that suggests that if we simply dismiss television as a fad, we may be missing out on something intrinsically valuable in our nature (16). In her essay “The Distorting Mirror of Reality Television,” Sarah Coleman suggests that reality television offers a distorting reflection, a “dark vision of humanity in the guise of light entertainment,” one that asks us to see who we are in this world. distorted reflection of our values ​​(19). The question then is: what do we see when we see ourselves in this “cheap mirror” (“Reality TV” 16)? Whatever the answer to this question, the question itself suggests that there is something intrinsically human in our fascination with r... middle of paper... so as to be the winner; that it's okay to betray others because winning is everything; that annoying, devious, hysterical liars are much more interesting than honest, conscientious, altruistic people; and that we are not really a nation of communities but a group of individuals fighting for ourselves, all of which suggests on a very deep level that we feel better when we look at people who we believe are worse off than us. The saddest lesson, however, may well be that we are starved of this kind of inherently cruel entertainment because our lives seem so much more boring in comparison, an observation that suggests that what we can learn from Reality TV doesn't necessarily apply only to our generation, but to those who preceded us and those who will follow, including these hypothetical anthropologists who are watching these shows to understand us better.