On the face of it, Kid Nation sounds a lot like the last season of Survivor (the one in which participants were separated according their race): designed to court controversy. Its basically Lord of the Flies as a reality show - kids, left to their own devices, competing, forming alliances, and getting injured. Considering the knee-jerk, "well, I never" reaction that this show is sure to provoke, I thought I'd consider what the likely risks and rewards of such a show really are.
The NYTimes article seems to dwell on the worse-case scenarios outlined in the participant consent contract. So, why would a parent allow their child to risk life and limb for a shot at $25,000 and possible semi-fame? First off, I think that critics of the show's ethics will likely exaggerate the risk to the children involved. Though I haven't seen the show, I'd guess that the actual risk of bodily harm to the participants is very low, but is made to look much higher than it actually is. This is the case with most reality shows. The producers play up the danger element and play down the fact that their are highly trained medics just off camera. It wouldn't be to the producer/network's advantage to have a participant seriously hurt, even if they weren't at financial risk b/c of the air-tight contract. Really, they're all about trying to make situations seem far riskier than they really are, and they're quite good at that.
But why risk any chance of harm to your children? I think its less about the monetary reward and more about the changing nature of celebrity and what it means to be on national television. Setting aside the questionable motivations of the stage-parent for a moment, we can safely say that many more Americans can realistically aspire to be recognizable to people they do not know personally (my basic definition of fame/celebrity) thanks to YouTube and reality TV.
Celebrity before reality TV and YouTube was a rare commodity that was synonymous with a dramatic increase in one's monetary and social capital. There was always a downside - your public identity would be predetermined. Before you met new people, they'd already have a fixed (often inaccurate) idea of who you were. The ability to shift our perceived identities according to context is something we do unconsciously all the time in order to communicate with others. To be deprived of that ability is likely to make a celebrity feel isolated. Of course, this was a small price to pay for all the money and adoration that old-school celebs received.
After almost a decade of popular network reality TV, it seems apparent that the notoriety achieved by the contestants comes with a different set of trade-offs. Advertisers and producers still recognize the value of minor celebrities - familiarity to an audience garners attention (and perhaps affection) for their product, but its unclear how much that audience familiarity really boosts sales or viewership (I'm guessing that a cameo by Gervais from Survivor doesn't result in the ratings boost that a cameo by Bill Murray would). Also, more and more reality shows are niche marketed, so that a person's inability to function as a mutable public persona would only be limited to a segment of the public.
If nothing else, we can say that the duration and extent of fame seems to have shrunk both the upside and downside of fame, though I'd suspect that people would still recognize you long after your value as a spokesperson or promoter diminished. There are good parts about being on TV and bad parts, and its difficult for either the critic or the proponent to say which outweighs the other until we come up with some sort of unbiased longitudinal study of celebreality. Until then, you can't fall back on the old "they knew what they were getting into when they signed the contract" defense. If no one really knows the long term effects of semi-fame on one's mental health, then the "informed" in "informed consent" doesn't really mean anything.
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10/13/07
Upon further reflection, I've decided that the new fame (reality TV, online fame) is a much worse deal than old fashioned fame for this reason: the rewards, the positive reputation and the money that comes with it do not last very long, but the inability to be anything other than what you were at the moment that fame struck is just as long as before. In other words, the perks are fewer but the downside is just as big.
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