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Cash CabThe internet has given us many wonders; spaghetti cat; keyboard cat; people who think they are human manifestations of the Na'vi creatures from 'Avatar'. But one thing it has taken away is the element of surprise for all our other media. These days, whether you miss a sports game or the season premiere of 'Big Live', you basically have to avoid doing even a preliminary Google search lest you happen on a spoiler. And checking Wikipedia? Forgetaboutit...someone updated the page before the credits even started to roll. So does the Internet ruin your TV watching experience?"The punch heard round the world": if there's one thing we'll be telling our children about the very first genesis of what is now called 'Jersey Space Shore' ("Guidettes in Space!"), it will be about the time everyone on the internet saw a woman shaped like a cube with curves get punched in the face so hard that the television decided to cut the image completely. Of course, this was only after MTV aired the punch on all their promos and showed cast-members caving in the faces of random people in every subsequent episode, but the point was still clear: violence on women isn't cool (unless you are another woman), and if a video goes viral before it even airs, the producers might cut it out of spite or to make room for another Axe body-spray commercial.
fight on Jersey Shore
But that's just one outrageous (and obvious) example: more recently we found ourselves completely agog with the number of contestants coming forward with potential spoilers about Discovery Channel's 'Cash Cab'. Suddenly it's like the Discovery Channel's own version of 'Twenty-One', with former contestants taking to Reddit to debate the fairness of their experiences and whether they were clued in ahead of time that the cab they were about to take was in fact, Ben Bailey's cash cab. Um, so it's not the most exciting debate in Internet history, but now we know that if someone answers an animal question with the genus and species, the producers tell them to be "less specific." Good to know!

And though this seems sort of niche, it opened our eyes to a phenomenon we never knew existed: basically every reality television show, from 'American Idol' to 'Hoarders', has spurned dozens that have taken to the web to vomit their experience all over, and in doing so have probably screwed up their confidentiality agreement royally. Whoops! But this doesn't ruin our love of shows like 'Cash Cab' or 'Jersey Shore'. If anything we're more excited to watch them knowing that every new episode drives another crazy person to rant on the Internet about how they were "scammed" into signing release forms to be on TV.