The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.
The zeal with which television ...executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are sad? Or are we relieved by the knowledge that our circumstances might be better? As reality television extends into the experiences of the everyday, it makes dramatic and often shocking the mundane aspects of our intimate relations, inviting us as viewers into a volatile arena of mediated morality.
This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer demanding new tools for capturing television's relationships with audiences. Rather than asking how the reality television genre is interpreted as 'text' or representation the authors investigate the politics of viewer encounters as interventions, evocations, and more generally mediated social relations.
The authors show how different reactions can involve viewers in tournaments of value, as women viewers empathise and struggle to validate their own lives. The authors use these detailed responses to challenge theories of the self, governmentality and ideology.
A must read for both students and researchers in audience studies, television studies and media and communication studies.
What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive ...mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.
The Makeover Sender, Katherine
10/2012, Volume:
26
eBook
Watch this show, buy this product, you can be a whole new you! Makeover television shows repeatedly promise self-renewal and the opportunity for reinvention, but what do we know about the people who ...watch them? As it turns out, surprisingly little.The Makeover is the first book to consider the rapid rise of makeover shows from the perspectives of their viewers. Katherine Sender argues that this genre of reality television continues a long history of self-improvement, shaped through contemporary media, technological, and economic contexts. Most people think that reality television viewers are ideological dupes and obliging consumers. Sender, however, finds that they have a much more nuanced and reflexive approach to the shows they watch. They are critical of the instruction, the consumer plugs, and the manipulative editing in the shows. At the same time, they buy into the shows' imperative to construct a reflexive self: an inner self that can be seen as if from the outside, and must be explored and expressed to others. The Makeover intervenes in debates about both reality television and audience research, offering the concept of the reflexive self to move these debates forward.
Reality television is global. Transnational television companies and international distribution networks facilitate the worldwide circulation of popular shows; the 1990s in particular saw the growth ...of media companies that specialize in the development of reality television formats that are easily adaptable to local variations. While the industrial history of the global migrations of reality television is well established, there has been less consideration of the theoretical and methodological implications of this expansion. The Politics of Reality Television encompasses an international selection of expert contributions which consider the specific ways these migrations test our understanding of, and means of investigating, reality television across the globe. The book addresses a wide range of topics, including: the global circulation and local adaptation of reality television formats and franchises; the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto “ordinary” people; the transformation of self under the public eye; the tensions between fierce loyalties to local representatives and imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides; and the struggle over the meanings and values of reality television across a range of national, regional, gender, class and religious contexts. The Politics of Reality Television proposes ways in which we can think through the international dimensions of reality television in the context of highly mobile media, politics, and publics. It offers a global, comparative examination of reality television alongside empirical research about the genre, its producers and consumers.
International in scope and more comprehensive than existing collections, A Companion to Reality Television presents a complete guide to the study of reality, factual and nonfiction television ...entertainment, encompassing a wide range of formats and incorporating cutting-edge work in critical, social and political theory. Original in bringing cutting-edge work in critical, social and political theory into the conversation about reality TV Consolidates the latest, broadest range of scholarship on the politics of reality television and its vexed relationship to culture, society, identity, democracy, and "ordinary people" in the media Includes primetime reality entertainment as well as precursors such as daytime talk shows in the scope of discussion Contributions from a list of international, leading scholars in this field
Social cognitive theory suggests a likely relationship between behavior modeled on increasingly popular reality television (RTV) and user behavior modeled on social networking sites (SNSs). This ...study surveyed young adults (N = 456) to determine the extent to which RTV consumption explained a range of user behavior in the context of social network sites. Results show a consistent relationship between RTV consumption and the length of time spent on these sites, the size of users' networks, the proportion of friends not actually met face to face, and photo sharing frequency while controlling for age and gender.
Watching Dubai Bling reminded me of Lola and Bruce, sibling canines who found homes at the same time. When I got my dog Lola, she was driven around in a Citroen C3, while the wealthy couple who ...adopted Bruce flew him around the world on a private jet-two very different dog (not to mention dog-owner) experiences. The cast of "Dubai Bling" describe themselves as "materialistic and proud" and feature real estate CEOs, Saudi TV personalities and socialites alike. They shop for trinkets like a $300,000 necklace that involve the same amount of deliberation as I put into deciding whether to splurge on a cafe latte. Does this program give you insight into Dubai culture, where 88 percent of the population are expats? To be honest, I don't know. This show definitely confirms what I presumed about Dubai being the Arab Disneyland full of extravagance and luxury. But I can't tell you how realistic it is. I don't think anyone is watching it hoping to get a representative sample of the population.
Individuals and collectives living in different centuries and locales have been fetishized through violent narratives and media and alienated from their histories, turning them into spectacles for ...scientific inquiry and popular entertainment. In this presentation I demonstrate how narratives and media images that turned human beings into objects of spectacle in anthropology displays at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, tightly link to constructs about incarcerated people in the American prison reality television program, Lockdown. Organizers of anthropology displays employed social-evolutionist assumptions, masquerading as truth upheld by scientific authority, to justify the captivity of primitivized peoples deemed expendable. While on display, humans from diverse cultural contexts were situated as representations of innate and extreme human natures, linear temporalities, and of the supremacy of the American nation-state. The television show Lockdown, airing from 2007 to 2017 and continuing in reruns today, similarly displays incarcerated people as examples of the violent extremes of human existence and asserts that their captivity, in the form of incarceration, is necessary for the safety of the American nation-state. I argue that turning incarcerated people into spectacles through prison reality programming is central to how the prison-industrial complex remains a white supremacist settler fantasy based on dispossession and extermination.
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