My first encounter with Laguna Beach
This entry is part of a research project for Cultural Interfaces and Cross-Cultural Rhetoric at Stanford University. For more about this assignment and the class projects go here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/ccr/blog/2008/04/cultural_interfaces_research_p.htm.
Over Spring Break I did not travel back home but instead stayed on the Stanford campus to do research. It was pretty quiet at night with of the students gone. I found myself needing a rest from studying, so I went online and surfed the Internet. I came upon MTV’s website. Laguna Beach, I saw, had videos online. Without any DVDs or a TV nearby I thought about watching an episode or two. This was, after all, a popular show I had heard about. Many of my high school friends watched it. In fact, they had entire parties where they would come to together to watch the show. What was all the hype? I decided to watch an episode.
With its pristine beaches and multimillion-dollar homes, Laguna Beach is one of the wealthiest, most beautiful beachside communities in the world. From prom to graduation, the Laguna Beach cast took viewers along the ride of their lives. Their tumultuous affairs became the stuff of prime time drama. Except all this was “real.” Indeed, Soon I found my self addicted and living almost vicariously though my high school days.
My own addiction to the show that warm spring night reflects the grand interest that the public also had in the show. After its debut, Laguna Beach became one of the most watched shows on MTV in the United States, surpassing The Real World as MTV’s top-rated series. The antics of Laguna Beach's characters— LC, Kristin, Stephen and Talan—proved to be not only entertaining, but also wildly addicting as the show continually captured the attention of 3 million viewers every week in its first season. MTV.com’s site-wide traffic for Laguna Beach content generated more than 90 million page views to date.
In spite of its success, when most op-ed writers and media analysts discussed the social value of Laguna Beach, the underlying assumption was that low-quality television programming is a long-standing problem. Countless articles lamented the show as part of a trend of reality television that is hurting both America's moral fiber and the quality of good TV.
But lost in these accounts was how complex and stimulating a show like Laguna Beach could be. As Steven Johnson, bestselling author of Everything Bad is Good For You, states: the shows that make “the most demands on their audience…turn out to be among the most lucrative in television history.” Indeed, Laguna Beach does demand a lot of its teen audience by asking them to engage their mental, social, and emotional intelligence. I argue that, contrary to what the vast majority of critics assume, reality television shows like Laguna Beach are more sophisticated than they are given credit for and may actually be making teens’ smarter. Moreover, they should not be figured as the source for some of problems that face teens today.