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jaranda--

you've led me here into a whole new world: I've never watched a reality show, nor ever quite understood why so many others watch them so incessantly. Your essay is filled with material that is new, and so very intriguing to me.

You begin w/ quite an onslaught of questions--how many of them do you answer? Are any of them more important to you, or to the argument you develop, than others?

I actually found myself wanting to add another question to the list, one that would be prior to all the others, and reveal some of the presumptions that seem to underlie your study, but are never articulated. What is the real? Until you have a workable definition of that concept, all the description which follows, about what appears or "does not appear to be real" doesn't really take us very far.

You say, for instance, that some of the shows are "real in the sense that they feature real people trying to prove themselves physically or mentally." You quote Shields along the same line, as saying that the reality of these shows "derives from contestants wanting things that people in real life want." You observe that the "competition aspect" of these shows make them "real." And yet you also say that some of these shows are "not real" because the situations--like being padlocked together!--are not situations in which most of us find ourselves. Or that they are real because they represent not external but internal reality, an actor's "perception of what is real": "this is real because this is my life." Or that the end of a reality show does not represent "the end of reality," but only "the end of constructed reality, something made for the viewer's enjoyment." What does that phrase , "constructed reality" mean to you? Isn't reality that which is not "constructed," but comes to us "straight"? How does "constructed reality" intersect w/ the other phrases above, about the realities of wanting, or competing, or perceiving?

You also repeatedly show me viewers unsure about the reality being represented on these shows: "forced to decide for themselves what they wanted to believe,""forced to make their own decision about whether the whole show had been 'real' or 'fake.'" Or not wanting "to think about whether what is happening is real or not," but just wanting to "watch something compelling." [Does this observation vitiate all your earlier questions? Suggesting that the "reality level" of a show isn't relevant to its ratings?] You also show viewers watching "other people's perceptions of reality, rather than experiencing" their own. Or being fascinated with other people's lives--but whether as "a