Just as Penn State students began their classes, the summer's hottest and highest rated reality television show came to end.

The two-hour series finale of Survivor aired Wednesday night on CBS and was followed by a one-hour town hall meeting with the original sixteen castaways.

But the end of Survivor marks only the beginning of a trend that has taken over network and cable television, a trend in which viewers watch edited versions of others' lives in the comfort and privacy of their own home.

Clay Calvert, assistant professor of journalism, calls this phenomenon "mediated voyeurism." Calvert recently wrote a book titled Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy and Peering in Modern Culture.

In the book, due out in bookstores at the end of September, Calvert defines mediated voyeurism as, "the consumption of revealing images of and information about others' apparently real and unguarded lives, often yet not always for purposes of entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse through the means of the mass media and Internet."

For most college-aged students, the trend of reality TV started ten years ago with MTV's The Real World, but Calvert said mediated voyeurism started long before then with shows like Candid Camera, COPS, America's Funniest Home Videos and a PBS documentary titled An American Family.

The Real World's premise is simple: Seven strangers live in one house for three months and have their lives taped for the entire world to see.

The show is designed to see what happened "when people stop being polite and start getting real," according to its opening credits.

The Real World has since dealt with many real issues such as AIDS, alcoholism and sexual preference.

Calvert, however, questions the reality of The Real World.

"The irony of The Real World is that it's the farthest thing from the real world," Calvert said. He added that the cast members are chosen for conflict to live in posh apartments that few people can call a reality.

Now almost every network on television has its own reality TV show.

In addition to Survivor, CBS has another hit reality TV show, Big Brother, which is comparable to The Real World. Ten strangers are taped while living in small living quarters.

Unlike The Real World, Big Brother has a game show twist. During the show's three-month run, the tenants hold biweekly votes to nominate two housemates for removal from the house. Big Brother viewers then choose who is kicked out of the house through telephone voting.

PBS has gone one step further by debuting a British reality TV show titled The 1900 House. The basic setup is the same — a family is living in the presence of surveillance cameras for three months — but the twist to this series is that they must live as if it is the year 1900.

The Next Generation of Reality TV

As more and more reality TV shows hit the airways, new, exotic and sometimes strange series erupt. ABC just purchased the rights to Jailbreak, a British reality series in which 10 people who agree to become prisoners are trapped in a specially constructed jail and must overcome physical and mental challenges to escape. In the British version, the first person to get out of jail wins $160,000.

A Survivor spin-off that has yet to be purchased by a network is tentatively titled Destination Mir. It will document contestants who will rigorously train in preparation for a trip to the Russian space station.

And of course there's Survivor II: The Australian Outback, already in the works and will premiere after the Super Bowl on January 28, 2001.

This winter, ABC will debut The Mole. For three weeks, 10 strangers — five women, five men — must work together to accomplish a series of physically and mentally challenging tasks. While completing the tasks, the group earns money, which is kept in a pot. One of the 10 contestants is the mole, whose sole purpose is to sabotage each challenge. The contestants' goal is to figure out who the mole is in order to win the pot.

Money seems to be a large component in most of the reality shows. Fox's newest reality television show adds an additional component — love.

The producers of The Real World and its spin-off, Road Rules, will present the Love Cruise.

Eighteen single men and women, from the ages of 22-34, will be sent on a cruise, during which they will be paired up to compete in daily challenges ranging from dance contestants to trivia quizzes.

Every other day contestants will be able to change their current partners, if they so choose.

As usual, cameras will be rolling at all times and every two days, two singles will be voted off of the boat.

"The whole game is set up to increase people's chances of finding a soul mate," said Bruce Toms, co-executive producer of the show, in a KRT News Service article.

NBC will hop on the reality TV bandwagon later with a Dutch show called Chains of Love. In the show a person is handcuffed to five people of the opposite sex and forced to spend their days chained together. With each passing day, the person in the center of the chain gets to banish one person. In the end, a man and woman will remain and they will be able to choose to spend more time together or split up for good.

In an article in the July 31 edition of Time, NBC's West Coast President Scott Sassa said, "Reality programming is definitely here. It isn't a fad, it's a trend."

So for the voyeurs found in all of us, reality TV is in what Calvert calls a "saturation period," meaning there's tons of shows out there.

"Eventually our interest will wane," Calvert adds. "Right now it (reality TV) is new and different and the audience is always searching for shows that are new and different."