"Maui Fever" & "Laguna Beach"

After our class discussion and our viewing of Laguna Beach, I began to think about how reality television portrays people and if this portrayal accurately represents the "real" people in the area the show is based on? This led me to think about a new show I had recently watched on MTV called Maui Fever. The first episode of Maui Fever aired last week Wednesday and has caused a great deal of controversy. Maui Fever at least after viewing the first episode...which was so stupid to me that I found it hard to watch...seems to be all about a group of "locals" who live a party life with the main goal of hooking up with tourists.

The characters and lifestyle they live in this reality show has cause controversy with many people that are Maui natives. They feel that the show portrays Maui badly and that the people in the show are not even Maui natives, like the show claims they are. This controversy made me think, do people that watch Maui Fever and other reality shows like it believe that this is what the natives of Maui are like? Or back to Laguna Beach....do people think that the people of Laguna Beach represent how people act in this area of CA?

As I thought about these questions I realized that if people have never been to CA or Maui that they only have the option to believe things that they seen in the media....so they might think this is how life truly is in these areas. At this point I realized why the actual natives of Maui were up set with the show Maui Fever and how much it truly harms the perception people have of the areas and people that live in the areas. After all, I do not think that everyone that lives in Maui lives a life of partying and hooking up and that everyone in CA has tons of money and is only concerned with shopping, looks, and relationships.

These lead me to some questions that I don't think have any clear answer but are something I was left thinking about....1)How much do reality TV shows affect our perceptions or true reality?; 2) Do they hurt our society?