Jonathan Storm: Mr. & Mrs. Balloon Boy did it because we will watch

We are a chattering, communal species, nosy, intensely curious about the joys and travails of others, because they help each of us understand how we fit into the human fabric.

And we are an innovative species, creating marvelous contraptions that can plumb the depths of the universe or analyze the most complex interactions of subatomic particles.

It's not the computer's fault that Americans watched 10 billion (mostly silly) videos on YouTube in August. It's not the television's fault that the spectacle of a little boy floating all alone in the troposphere attracts more viewers than analysis of the Senate health-care bill.

When you buy the newspaper for sports and TV reviews, you get the health-care bill, whether you want it or not. When cable news does the health-care bill, without somebody screaming about it, hardly anybody watches. When cable shows personal peril, everybody watches.

Not only did we create the TV machine that, until recently, was the only one that could bring us all together in real time, we also created the mechanism - 24-hour cable news - that enables the machine to do it instantly, at every moment.

Over and over Thursday, cable reporters from Fox's Shepard Smith to CNN's Kyra Phillips said they were being told there was a 6-year-old in the balloon, that people thought he was there. Nobody ever said it was certain.

Mistakes must be made when the news is instantaneous. Even the sober and principled ABC anchor Peter Jennings got took. He gave air time to a phone call from a Howard Stern-inspired prankster, with a suspiciously ghetto-stereotype voice, claiming to be O.J. Simpson's relative on the night of live coverage of the infamous white Bronco slow-speed chase.

It didn't take a reporter or a scientist Thursday to point out what had to be in the mind of almost everybody looking at the weird device, floating as weightlessly and haphazardly as a flower petal over the Colorado countryside: There's nothing but helium in that balloon.

People watched because they wanted the kid in there. "Imagine the fear of the child." "The poor, panic-crazed parents." Whatever the speculation, the corresponding inner feeling, probably unrealized, was, "Thank goodness my life is more normal, and at the moment, more successful."

It's the same motivation that fueled conjecture about the ruin of the rich and famous sports superstar. "Do you think he's going to kill himself?"

It's the same reason Jon and Kate Gosselin, of moderate interest primarily to young mothers when life was going smoothly for them and their brood of eight, ballooned into gossip superstars after their marriage went south. "How greedy and stupid." "Oh, those poor kids."

When O.J. went motoring - not that long ago - we were pretty much constrained to talk about it at the water cooler, or in similar personal encounters. Now, with the computer and its social networks, we can talk worldwide. The cleverer among us can blog and make videos, and we can talk about them.

The false flight of Falcon Heene was tailor made for revolving treatment in every medium. Before the day was out, someone had created a Hitler Rant on YouTube (http://tinyurl.com/ylxcmlr) in which the supposed president of the Hitler News Network blasts his subordinates for falling for the hoax.

(The Hitler Rant, a YouTube staple, consists of a scene from the 2004 German movie Downfall in which Bruno Ganz, playing Der Fuhrer, has a meltdown, augmented by English subtitles that have nothing to do with the film. In different incarnations, Hitler rants about the Cowboys losing the first game in their new stadium, having his shoes being stolen and thrown at George W. Bush, even about the hundreds of YouTube rants making fun of him.)

It used to be someone had to accomplish something, or at least be notably unaccomplished (Zsa Zsa Gabor or Paris Hilton), to make his foibles worth following. Now, there are reality shows, where editors work strenuously to create heightened characters out of Mr. and Ms. Nobody, bringing them one of the precious commodities in an anonymous society: fame.

We all long to be noticed. Just look at Phanavision during a Phillies game. But reality shows seem to feed a toxic need for fame, a need, it now appears, that drove the Balloon Boy's parents to perpetrate their hoax.

If there were no reality shows, if there were no cable news, if there were no television, this whole thing would have never happened. Certainly, it's not our fault.

Television gets taken for

a ride, Jonathan Storm, D1.