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And it so it spreads, as it must – the Balloon Boy Halloween costume, the online Balloon Boy game, the Balloon Boy song (Ev4n Holt's Balloon Boy Diss), the inevitable T-shirts, mugs and hats, and, yes, balloons. What did we do to deserve this? A lot. We brought it on ourselves.

Yes, all this merchandise and content resulting from a few hours of fuss over one rinky-dink weather balloon floating in the sky with, possibly, a small boy trapped inside it. Then the revelation that his family, the suddenly famous and heinous Heenes, had concocted a hoax to better the chance of landing a reality-TV show. Television fell for it. A vast public fell for it. Of course they did. A small boy in terrible danger. Anybody would be concerned. No point dissing the coverage or moaning about the fame whores. We are suckers for the authentic and the instant.

At CNN and other all-news outlets, a decision about news value was made. Easy to criticize later, but someone decided to lead with the heart, not the head. Balloon Boy's story stoked emotions that are stoked all day, every day, on the Internet – raw feelings of anger, pity, sympathy or contempt. All a news exec had to do – as they must – was look at the online comments at CNN's website; or at what's topping the charts on YouTube. Emotion is everything. There's no more intensely emotional story than that of a missing child. You put Pakistan's crisis aside when a kid is in danger. You just do.

Now Balloon Boy joins Susan Boyle, Sarah Palin and Jon and Kate Gosselin as emblematic creatures of our time. Reality TV has wrought this culture of instancy, this warped-speed, worldwide babble about what's happening now. But don't blame television or its genre of reality TV. There's no “them” concocting falsehoods to fool us. It's us.

Reality TV arrived in North America in 2000, with the first U.S. editions of Survivor and Big Brother. They begat dozens of copycats that launched dozens of immediately famous ordinary people. Joe Millionaire. All those Bachelors and Bachelorettes. American Idols. Dancers, has-been celebs, huge families, fat people. Reality TV might have shrivelled to an obscure subgenre but for us and our need to be part of the game. Personal blogs, Google Alerts, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter: They allow us to sneer, mock and defend, if we like, the antics of the suddenly famous. Nattering, bitching, dissing, barking away to our shallow hearts content.

Balloon Boy's dad, Richard Heene, knew CNN would give massive coverage to a missing boy in a balloon. He probably intuited the online chatter that would ensue, propelling that TV-show deal. The torque that has driven so much of reality TV is the reasonable belief that ordinary people, with all their messy baggage and lack of sophistication, are more authentic than the fictional doctors, lawyers and detectives of network dramas.

In choosing Palin as a candidate for vice-president, and pushing her trashy family into the spotlight, the Republican Party was driven by exactly the same impulse. There was even a knocked-up teenager. The Palins could have come straight out of Wife Swap or Married by America. And then Palin's flame fizzled. As it does with all ordinary people made famous by the double-whammy of the reality-TV value system and the technology that allows fervid, constant commentary by us, the ultimate arbiters. We bore easily.

Susan Boyle can sympathize. Over a period of mere days, millions watched a YouTube clip from Britain's Got Talent featuring the dowdy 47-year-old as she astonished the judges with her beautiful voice. A heartwarming experience. Viewers connected. Boyle had that air of authenticity. Her initial moment came via reality TV; her fame was spread by people telling people over the Net. Then came the mainstream-media coverage.

Who cares about Susan Boyle now? She warmed our hearts, then she fizzled. Balloon Boy's dad didn't think about the fizzle part. He only anticipated the heart-warming part.

Jon and Kate Gosselin illustrate several key elements of the phenomenon created by reality-TV and worldwide babble. First, they are the sort of fame sluts ignored by those who were deeply moved by plain, homely Boyle – the kind of viewers who recognized her song from Les Misérables. They're on Facebook, though, and have their favourite blogs to read on the Internet. They pushed the story. They made Boyle famous, but many of them could not care less about the shrill, messy, kinda white-trash Gosselins.

They don't really control this culture, though. According to the online edition of Vanity Fair, Jon and Kate Gosselin have, since March, appeared on 50 magazine covers – more than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Interestingly, they're not on the cover of the print edition of Vanity Fair (Penelope Cruz is) but they're ideal fodder for a several-thousand word article online. (And, currently, it's the most-read thing in the online Vanity Fair.) They are the quintessential emanation of the cultural phenomenon of reality TV and Internet natter.

See, it's much more fun to comment online about Jon and Kate than it is about Cruz's hair, dress and va-voom posterior, which features prominently on the print edition's cover. She's Hollywood royalty. Distant. Untouchable. Sprinkled with stardust. The Gosselins are our noisy neighbours. She was always snippity with him. He was passive-aggressive. We know the type.

Initially, they were the focus of a TV show because they had eight kids. That's the heart-warming aspect.

Then, well, the fame and the money made it all toxic. Rumours surfaced that Kate was shagging their bodyguard, and Jon a teacher. Such mundane, tacky misbehaviour. But authentic. And there's the key, again – the authenticity of their awfulness empowers us to be nosy, judgmental and snicker endlessly.

We got nosy and judgmental about Boyle and Palin, too. Now we're doing it with Balloon Boy and his hideous, fame-seeking father.

We like reality TV. The authenticity of its creatures, whether contrived or real, appeals to us. One person's Susan Boyle is someone else's Kate Gosselin. We obsess about these people, and the Internet allows us to indulge our obsession.

Nobody foisted this phenomenon on us. Balloon Boy's dad understood. As did CNN. It's a collective weakness, and, yes, we have the popular culture we deserve.