Fluid Boundaries in Reality TV - Essay Example

Reality TV is supposed to be about “real” people and their “real” behaviours, but as the existence of the camera and the gaze of viewers and producers shape the “realities” of reality TV show participants, the “reality” of reality shows comes into question. Kilborn (1994) argues that reality is not a given, but constructed through TV programming. Sears and Godderis (2011) define “reality” in reality TV as not actually “real” because of the panoptic gaze that influences how people act and what can be seen amongst these actions. On the contrary, Couldry (2003) asserts that “reality” in its influx and ambiguities is the essence of reality TV. Defining “reality” delimits its essence and potential, when it feeds on shifting and heterogeneous perceptions of what people see as ordinary, real, and relevant to their lives. How does reality TV construct the boundary between the ordinary and extraordinary? Reality TV creates a flexible and dynamic boundary, where the audience can hardly see the differences between the two. Reality TV constructs a fluid boundary between the ordinary and extraordinary through depicting diverse ambiguities in the definitions and redefinitions of reality and fiction, as concepts of interactivity and democratisation and spectatorship and participation blur in the reality TV genre. Reality TV constructs the boundary between the ordinary and extraordinary by depicting and contributing to ambiguities between reality and fiction. Bourdon (2008) explores the changing definitions of reality TV in “Self-Despotism: Reality Television and the New Subject of Politics”. He notes that while the media industry was initially slow to label the genre of reality TV, scholars used the label to help them analyse the growing social interest in it: “Among academics, reality television is an ideal notion for theorists like Jason Mittell who seek to...use them simply as one element of a set of wider ‘discursive practices’ that help to categorize texts” (67). The category launches and supports scholarly inquiries. Reality TV, however, has changed dramatically since the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, called attention to the new Public Broadcasting System series, An American Family, which captured the lives of the Louds, a middle-class California family (Sanneh, 2011: 72). Mead describes the show as “a new kind of art for,” an innovative form that can be “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel” (Sanneh, 2011: 72). Sanneh (2011), in the article “The Reality Principle,” stresses that since An American Family, reality TV has become an “amorphous category” (72) because of emerging new forms of TV shows that depict themselves as reality TV, such as What Not to Wear and The Apprentice. She is concerned of the “reality” in some of these current reality TV shows, when assumptions about beauty are based on fiction, the myth of Western beauty. Sanneh (2011) mentions the work of Pozner, a journalist and activist, who watched and analysed “more than a thousand hours of unscripted programming” (73). Pozner berates What Not to Wear, a makeover show, where “an ethnically and economically diverse string of women are ridiculed for failing to conform to a single upper-middle-class, mainstream-to-conservative, traditionally feminine standard of fashion and beauty” (Sanneh, 2011: 74). “Reality” is lost when someone imposes their fictional view of beauty and gender on reality show participants, instead of relying on the spontaneity and diversity of discussions on these themes. The ordinary is heighted to a pre-packaged notion of the extraordinary, when someone defines what is supposed to be extraordinary among ordinary lives. Reality TV expands further through the definition and redefinitions of reality-in-flux per se and reality TV shows in general. In the book Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, Couldry (2003) asserts that reality TV should not be limited to footages of unstructured and functional activities. He argues that reality TV is “real” because of its “ritual category,” its “liveness” (103). An example is the liveness of Big Brother, where the audience can see almost every action and interaction of its participants. The camera, nonetheless, symbolises the controlled gaze of viewers, directors, and producers. Reality TV in itself mediates “reality” through the packaging it in TV form, so the “reality” of its shows relies on defining rituals of liveness. Couldry (2003) provides the examples of reality game-shows that are known as “game-docs” because they document the “reality” of the participants behind the camera (103). Game-doc is like traditional non-reality TV shows with game rules and competitors, but is different from the latter because of its surveillance aspect. Some illustrations of game-docs are The Amazing Race and Survivor. Couldry (2003) illustrates the in-between status of game-doc that is essential to its reality TV distinction: “It is the ambiguity of ‘reality TV’ programmes with regard to their factual or fictional status that reproduces most effectively television’s ritualised claims to present ‘reality’” (103). These ambiguities enable reality TV to reinvent itself, while it remains loyal to the aspect of reflecting a portion, if not all, of the reality of its participants. John Corner (2002) suggests that “reality television” should be seen as part of “postdocumentary context,” a cultural environment of contradictions, where the audience, participants, and producers are not focused on the truthfulness and representational ethics of the shows, but more engaged with the space between reality and fiction that offer new forms of representational play and reflexivity (255). Viewers appreciate the fluid boundaries that produce “realities,” while suspending the reality of fiction in reality TV shows. Through these diverse definitions of “reality” and reality TV shows, boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary continue to shift alongside changes in viewers, media producers, and participants. Another exploration of the ambiguities of “reality” and fiction is that these ambiguities constantly shape and reshape the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary through the development of modernities. Kraidy (2008) studies the heterogeneity of modernities in “Reality TV and Multiple Arab modernities: A Theoretical Exploration.” He believes that Arab reality TV, though many are local versions or spin-offs of Western reality TV shows, should not be generalised as copycats alone because it undermines the hybridity of Arab realities. He asserts that “Arab reality TV programs are ‘hybrid texts’ spawned by a global, capitalistic, format-based media industry” that generate social and political conflicts because of “the uncertainty about the meaning and value of modernity derives not only from what separates nations, ethnic groups and classes, but also from the socio-cultural hybrids in which the traditional and the modern are mixed” (García-Canclini 1994: 2 cited in Kraidy, 2008: 51). Arab culture is sated with cultural amalgamations, but it is Arab TV that significantly provides the concretisation of their visual and aesthetic cultural hybrids (Kraidy, 2008: 51). Because of the loss of reality and fiction boundaries, Arab TV has become controversial to different stakeholders. Kraidy (2008) describes that: Arab reality TV is so intensely controversial, then, because it violates boundaries of identity and authenticity at a time when those boundaries have been hardened by the attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath—‘war on terrorism’, widespread violence and repression, Danish cartoons, and growing external intervention in Arab politics. (51). Arab reality TV opens up political discourses because of conflicts in modernist and traditional ideologies. As a result, seemingly apolitical reality TV shows have resulted to political actions, such as influencing street riots, because of al-Ra’is, the Arab version of Big Brother and clerics are demanding fatwas, because of Star Academy in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Kraidy, 2008: 52). Muslim clerics fear that reality TVs rupture conventional ontological beliefs through the latter’s articulation of spontaneous forms of cultural hybrids (Kraidy, 2008: 52). Complex emerging relations between Arab popular culture and politics ignite discourses on the connections between culture and power. Reality TV threatens some leaders who hold ontological religious beliefs as permanent truths that must not be altered through the epistemological interventions of reality TV. In addition, the visibility of ordinary people becomes ironically extraordinary because of constant surveillance, where ambiguities between power and powerlessness are present. The capability of audience members to watch over reality TV participants embodies the panoptic principles of Foucault (1977). Foucault (1977) argues that society has shifted from public torture as source of spectacle to imprisonment as a way of surveillance, so that they are watched, but they become visible in a different perspective. Surveillance as a model, he notes, happens in basic social institutions too, such as schools and hospitals, and workplaces, such as factories and barracks. The idea of the panopticon is captured in this scenario: Imagine a prison constructed in a circular form. On the outer perimeter of each level are the individual cells, each housing a single prisoner and each entirely isolated from the other to make it impossible for a prisoner to see or hear fellow prisoners. Each cell is visible to the gaze of the Inspector, who is housed in a central office from which he can scan all cells on the same level. (Whitaker, 1999: 32). Power is ordered according to the owner and object of the gaze. In “Roar like a Tiger on TV?” Sears and Godderis (2011) examine the reality TV show, A Baby Story, and how it challenges and/or intensifies gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability norms. They realise that the electronic panopticon of TV changes the roles and implications of power and knowledge and “the visible” (Sears and Godderis, 2011: 183). The existence of a group seeing another group provides an “immediate, collective and anonymous gaze” (Sears and Godderis, 2011: 183). The audience looks at the TV show participants, while the latter cannot view them back. The private melds into the public, thereby shifting boundaries from ordinary privacy to extraordinary reality TV privacy. Productive surveillance changes the ordinary into the extraordinary because it is gazed and controlled. Foucault analyses the cycle of productivity in disciplinary administrations. He states in Discipline and Punish that disciplinary surveillance produces “docile bodies,” wherein they are not static but stimulated for economic purposes: “Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force” (221). The primary ends of the discipline are attaining docile and pacified bodies, but the true power lies on a relentlessly industrious and invigorating one: The Panopticon...has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and effective, it does so not for power itself...its aim is to strengthen the social forces—to increase production, to develop the economy...to increase and multiply. (Foucault, 1977: 208). The audience participates in the panopticon, as they watch over and judge the show participants, as in Survivor. The social economy multiplies through the engagement of the audience. Bourdieu notes that the objectification of ordinary life creates a commodified social world (Garoian and Gaudelius, 2008: 31). Economic motives can co-opt the critical facilities of the audience, as the panopticon expands (Garoian and Gaudelius, 2008: 31). The spectacle culture introduces commodification discourse in reality TV, where the ordinary becomes one more source of economic oppression. Furthermore, productive surveillance provides the capital for reality TV, thereby controlling the latter’s ratings and “destiny” (to be cut or not to be cut due to ratings). Media consumers are paid to watch because TV shows have advertisements, including reality shows. Jhally and Livant (1986) depict watching as “paid” labour, where audiences do work by looking at advertising in exchange for accessing “free” programming content (125) in “Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness.” Watching advertisements is productive because it will: speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption... Through advertising, the rapid consumption of commodities cuts down on circulation and storage costs for industrial capital (Jhally and Livant, 1986: 125). The consumption of media commodities supports the process of their production. Surveillance fuels consumption and production altogether. Another way of discussing productive surveillance is examining how reality shows enhance the visibility of the ordinary, which requires viewer and participant efforts. Biressi and Nunn (2005) use case studies to investigate the nature and effects of reality TV in their book Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. They stress that, by being continuously watched, “unscripted” situations provide entertainment value because they are “real” to their watchers or audience (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 2). Though they recognise criticisms that reality TV shows, especially some of the most recent ones, can promote idiocy through stereotyped images and beliefs, they highlight the role of reality TV shows in demonstrating what is real to the show participants and the viewers. Biressi and Nunn (2005) believe in openness to diverse views because: ...new forms of reality TV are no less embedded in thorny debates about representing ordinary people, no less politically loaded than their documentary antecedents and no less complex and conflict as social contexts. For these reasons alone, it would be wise to treat them with respect” (2). They caution against over-generalisations of the value and effects of reality TV because of the cultural analysis of its differentiated impacts on viewers and participants. On the one hand, reality show participants seem to be powerless because they are watched. Oftentimes, they stay in the show because of viewer votes, such as in American Idol. On the other hand, participants are also powerful in shaping audience decisions. Those who know how to develop themselves and strategically dramatise effects have higher voter influence than those who do not. By their visibility, participants can use both their ordinariness and extraordinariness to be extraordinary to viewers. Respect for the ambiguities of reality TV also includes understanding it in its own context, including its own politics. Biressi and Nunn (2005) assert that “the politics of reality TV is a cultural politics” (3). It can be girl power politics or motherhood politics or labour politics. For example, Teen Mom involves girl power politics, where the teenagers learn that pregnancy and parenthood do not mix with adolescence years. Some audiences may find the show as empowering to teen mothers, while others might see it as dangerously romanticising teenage issues. Reality TV concerns the contradictions in political views that affect participants and viewers alike. Surveillance has its detrimental value, moreover, when religious actors and institutions view it as against their ontological realities. Kraidy (2008) offers the example of Star Academy’s high ratings in Saudi Arabia, which angered critics, who, among others, called it “Satan Academy” (Abbas, 2005 cited in Kraidy, 2008: 53). The Higher Council of ‘Ulamas gave a decisive fatwa. The central dilemma is the belief that promoting interaction between unmarried men and women and cultural hybridity undercuts “the Wahhabi view of Islamic authenticity (based on gender segregation and cultural purity), thus threatening the core of the Saudi social order” (Kraidy, 2008: 53). With this imposition, reality TV show producers and participants are rendered powerless to existing power centres of their society. Extraordinary is not always acceptable to organisations that defend static worldviews of what should be ordinary. Apart from the contrasts between visibility and invisibility and between power and powerlessness, reality TV shows that the ordinary and extraordinary are blurred when the audience are both participants and spectators. Some reality TV shows are about ordinary people, such as Big Brother, where the audience serve as spectators to the unravelling of their personalities and life stories. The participation, however, is limited, which in itself indicates that “reality” in reality TV is not ordinary, but what is extraordinary to viewers and TV show directors and producers. When ratings drop, it means that viewers are losing interest, and producers tend to desperately try to save the show through several gimmickries. The “ordinary” should not be “too ordinary” that it becomes boring to viewers. As spectators, viewers hold a higher sense of power over reality TV show programming, although not in clear democratised terms. In Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Andrejevic (2004) emphasises the simultaneity of spectator and participant roles of viewers. He mentions the situation of Anna Voog, who took a video of herself watching Big Brother. Andrejevic (2004) asserts that Voog is: ...caught between her television and her camera...On the one hand is the promise of interactivity- that access to the means of media production will be thrown open to the public at large, so that ‘everyone can have their own TV show’...On the other hand is the reality represented by reality TV- that interactivity functions increasingly as a form of productive surveillance allowing for the commodification of the products generated by what I call the work of being watched (2). The audience participates in the work of watching, while TV show participants are turned to products that are being watched. In ‘The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure”, Andrejevic (2002b) analyses the exploitative nature of reality TV. He wants to question the interactivity in reality TV as not a simple given, but a product of uneven economic relations: “The power in question is not the static domination of a sovereign Big Brother, but that of a self-stimulating incitement to productivity: the multiplication of desiring subjects and subjects’ desires in accordance with the rationalization of consumption” (Andrejevic, 2002b: 232). By actively participating in the watching process, they rationalise the consumption of reality TV participants as economic goods. Reality TV transforms media consumption into an economic process, as they simultaneously become participants and spectators. Aside from the blurred boundaries between participation and spectatorship, reality TV explores the ambiguity of interactivity and democratisation of participants as celebrities. In “The Kinder, Gentler Gaze of Big Brother”, Andrejevic (2002a) explores the importance of reality TV in supporting the interactive economy of modern media, while he understands the ambiguous implications of democratised celebrities. He asserts that “surveillance through 'reality TV' as a form of entertainment and self-expression can thus be understood as playing an important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an 'interactive' economy” (251). Surveillance allows viewers to be seemingly there in the sets of these TV shows in real time, participating in the actual events of the celebrities. Andrejevic (2002a) interviews cast members and producers of MTV’s reality show “Road Rules”, to examine the subjectivity of the definition of “reality.” He learns that subjectivity democratises the “production” of entertainment through giving more control to viewers too (Andrejevic, 2002a: 251). As viewers survey reality TV participants, however, the celebrity goes through a process of democratisation, where he/she becomes “real” according to his/her own perspectives on life issues and challenges. Andrejevic (2002a) believes that celebrity democratisation results to “disturbing implications for the democratic potential of the internet's interactive capability” (251). Couldry (2003), however, believes in the democratisation of reality TV. He mentions examples of people who want to be on TV because it verifies their existence and others who want to remove stereotypes about their groups (i.e. stereotypes about gay and tattooed people) (Couldry, 2003: 108). The result of these different individualistic personalities is ambiguity between interactivity and democratisation, where some participants underscore their individualities in the reality TV genre. Interactivity, moreover, shapes reality TV as an intervention for public service, thereby changing ordinary lives in extraordinary ways, although it remains a paradoxical business model. In Chapter 1 of the book Better Living through Reality TV, Ouellette and Hay (2007) depict these interventions as “TV’s foray into the helping culture” (33). They use ABC’s Miracle Workers as an example, a show that finances the treatment of seriously ill people, who do not have the money or contacts to treat their conditions. Stephen McPherson, president of ABC’s entertainment division, underscores the role of reality TV in providing valuable networks and resources for the disempowered members of society (Ouellette and Hay, 2007: 34). Ouellette and Hay (2007) note that TV has “quite aggressively pursued a form of civic engagement that enacts the reinvention of the government” (34-35). They criticise, however, how TV and the government capitalised on the shift of the welfare state government to a liberal government, where liberal governance operates within the principles of free market economics. In other words, reality TV, which “cares” for the people, is limited to its ratings and other business factors (Ouellette and Hay, 2007: 34). If ratings drop below expected levels, Miracle Workers will be axed like any other show, which is why audience interactivity is critical to reality TV success (Edwards, 2013). The caring variant of reality TV follows the same economic drivers of steadily rising profit. Dovey (2000), in his book Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television, avoids putting down the business model of reality TV shows or TV shows in general. He understands that “the economics and the form are of course finally related” (Dovey, 2000: 2). Producers have limitations on what to air because they are agents of their investors (Dovey, 2000: 2). Thus, reality TV is real in its intersection of and conflicts between social and economic interests. One more criticism of reality TV is that profiteering motives do not protect privacy, thereby altering the notion of privacy and individualism in ordinary lives. Biressi and Nunn (2005) apply psychoanalytic discourse on several game formats of reality TV. In Survivor, the group is perceived as a “case study in both group membership and individual neurosis” (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 5). Biressi and Nunn (2005) describe the use of individual confessions that are contrasted with dyadic and group alliances (5). Conflicts between individual confession and social behaviours are found, thereby indicating the clash between the individual and the group. Furthermore, privacy is not revered in reality TV, which breaches what is ordinary privacy to common people. Using video diaries, shock-tactic interviews and to-camera confessions, among others, Survivor exhibits the tensions between the boundaries of private and public domains (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 5). Viewers somehow become sadistic in their voyeuristic pleasures, as they witness people being crushed through divided loyalties and feelings of loss. Biressi and Nunn (2005) emphasise the “sense of democracy of feelings” that “underpins emotional realism” (5). Viewers feel that they can relate to those in TV because they are “real” people, but to the sacrifice of the privacy of the latter. An extreme end is the viewers’ ownership of these participants because of the interactivity level in reality TV shows. What is private becomes seriously public, where the social imposes itself on the individual. The rise of individualism, especially in documentary forms of reality TV, cannot be separated from social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Skeggs (2009) explores the meaning of the individual in reality TV in “The Moral Economy of Person Production: The Class Relations of Self-Performance on ‘Reality’ Television.” She asserts that reality TV demonstrates how personhood becomes a social “moral project,” a “dynamic project” that relies on labour, or “labour of person-production” (632). The self takes different forms: “enterprising, reflexive, possessed, prosthetic, or mobile self” (Skeggs, 2009: 632). Skeggs (2009) underscores that these concepts “share is an insistence on the centrality of cultural and symbolic capital,” thereby compelling TV show participants to improve themselves “by accrual of different forms of capital through enterprise, experimentation and/or play and display of their worth” (632). An example is how some people in Survivor develop emotionally, socially, and physically stronger personalities through the production of a better self. They have to invest in this new self, if they want to remain in the show at the minimum, or invest even more through creative techniques, if they want to win. The self becomes a changing entity, as environmental forces affect its development and evaluation. Furthermore, self-performance legitimates a person’s value, but in relation to existing access to different forms of capital. Skeggs (2009) describes the various techniques that allow viewers to “metonymically attach value” to TV show participants, such as “humiliation, evaluation, dislocation, reification, objectification and quantification” (638). Some examples are what participants of The Apprentice endure before they win the competition. The working-class submit themselves to these techniques, so that they can assess their performance in its emotional and physical dimensions, where the assumption is that they are dramatised as “inadequate”, thereby requiring “self-investment” (Skeggs, 2009: 638). Reality TV gives solutions to these deficits, although in different degrees and durations that depend on how participants operationalise their access to social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital (Skeggs, 2009: 638). Some scholars criticise reality TV shows as not truly contributing to self-improvement because participants are paid actors, but Skeggs (2009) emphasises that such generalisations are unwarranted. However scholars and audiences may see individual transformation, only participants can say if they have reached something more than what is expected from them (Skeggs, 2009: 640). Bourdieu calls this “identity work” in the midst of public disrouces (cited in Hill, 2005: 25). Achieving this form of learning develops the individual within and beyond his/her environmental conditions. Participants are not mere objects to be watched because they actively affect viewer behaviours through their own strategic actions and dramatic effects. Boundaries between the ordinary and extraordinary are always changing and shifting. Many people watch reality TV because it is ironically ordinary and extraordinary. Reality TV creates a flexible and dynamic boundary between fiction and reality, so that they can recreate “realities” that appeal to the ordinary and extraordinary senses of the target publics. Reality TV can perform various, sometimes conflicting functions, of creating cultural hybrids or enforcing social stereotypes or challenging them, generally following the will of the masses. With the public in control of the fate of these shows, they assert a sense of tyranny of the majority over the shows’ participants. One must not forget, nevertheless, that democratisation goes both ways, where participants view themselves alongside other participants and against the assessment of their viewers. While they are products to the audiences, they are also agents of self and social changes, and so reality includes the real changes that only they can validate, during and after their reality TV participation. And when this happens, ordinary people become extraordinary because of sustained efforts of self-development that produce inward and outward changes. The ambiguities of being watched can also produce ambiguities of watching and changing oneself. Reference List Andrejevic, M. (2004) Reality TV: The work of being watched, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Andrejevic, M. (2002a) ‘The kinder, gentler gaze of big brother’, New Media & Society, vol. 4, no.2, pp. 251-270. Andrejevic, M. (2002b) ‘The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 230-248. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2005) Reality TV: Realism and revelation, London: Wallflower Press. 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