Sit on your couch, take the remote control and turn on the television. Time to switch off from the problems of a day at work! Exhausted by your boss's complaints and delays in the subway, you find yourself being an observer of other's problems. How is that possible? Simply because mediated voyeurism has been thriving for the last five years and we-the people of the consumer society-are the ones who allow it to continue. .
This so-called "reality television- spans today from talk shows where you wash your dirty laundry in public (The Jerry Springer Show); or converted lofts where 16 human beings are trying to live together (Big Brother).
Those realities shows, which sprang first in the States, have today spread to the Old World and find their equivalents there: Loft Story, Ça va se savoir, l'Île de la Tentation (in France); Big Brother (in the United Kingdom); Gran Armado (in Spain) and so on .
Amongst those shows, one that has become popular worldwide, is the one where 16 castaways are isolated on a tropical island and have to survive during a certain period of time. The original show found its roots in the New World and was called SURVIVOR, and the following analysis can easily apply to all the other genres.
SURVIVOR saw the light on the U.S screens on March of 2000. For a period of 39 days, 16 castaways were marooned on a tropical island in the South China Sea (Pulau Tiga), with one ultimate goal to be the last survivor of this "game-. These 16 human beings were coming from all the corners of the United States of America, they were women and men of all ages (all adults of course).
Deprived of basic comforts, these 16 candidates had to learn how to live with strangers and at the same time be individualistic in order to win the $ 1,000 000. In the meantime, back to "terra firma- of USA, TV watchers were waiting impatiently every Thursday night to watch a one-hour episode on CBS, which summarized three days of island life, for the TV audience.