Imagine a distant post-apocalyptic future in which a large silver box has just been excavated from the ruins of what was once Los Angeles, a box that contains stack after stack of DVDs with titles like Survivor , The Bachelor , The Biggest Loser, The Swan, Real World, The Apprentice and Hell's Kitchen. What might anthropologists conclude about our 21st century society if these shows were their only insight into how we live our lives? Francine Prose ponders this 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 from it, but, “for that matter,” what “contemporary TV addicts might deduce.” "children and adults" might realize this if they took a closer look at their motivation for watching these shows (22). Salman Rushdie, in his article "Reality TV: A Talent Shortage and the Death of Mortality," suggests that we need to look closely at reality TV because "it tells us things about ourselves," and even though we don't think it does, it "should", a claim that suggests that if we simply view reality TV as a fad, we might be missing out on something intrinsically valuable in our nature (16). In her essay "The Distorting Mirror of Reality TV," Sarah Coleman suggests that reality TV offers a distorted reflection, a "dark vision of humanity under the guise of light entertainment," a consideration that asks us to see who we are in this context. distorted reflection of our values ​​(19). The question then is: what do we see when we look at ourselves in this “dime store mirror” (“Reality TV” 16)? Whatever the answer to this question, the question itself suggests that there is something intrinsically human about our fascination with middle of paper......the path and being the winner; that there is nothing wrong with betraying others because winning is everything; that boring, conniving, hysterical liars are far more interesting than honest, conscientious, altruistic people; and that we are not really a nation of communities but a group of individuals fighting for themselves – all of which suggests on a very deep level that we feel better when we look at people we consider to be worse off than ours. The saddest lesson, however, may very well be that we are starved of this kind of inherently cruel entertainment because our own lives seem so much duller by comparison, an observation that suggests what we can learn from reality TV doesn't necessarily apply just to our generation, but to those who came before us and those who will follow, including those hypothetical anthropologists who watch these shows to better understand us.