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Reacting to Reality Television
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.
eBook
Reality bites back : the troubling truth about guilty pleasure TV
Takes a look at how our favorite shows reinforce stereotypes and force-feed us messages about who we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to want. Pozner exposes the commercial and political agendas behind the genre, revealing how the shows negatively impact women, people of color, and future generations.
Book
Reality Television and Arab Politics
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.
eBook
Fooling with the Amish
Using Amish Mafia as a window into the interplay between the real and the imagined, this book dissects the peculiar appeals and potential dangers of deception in reality TV and popular entertainment.When Amish Mafia was released in 2012, viewers were fascinated by the stories of this secret group of Amish and Mennonite enforcers who used threats, extortion, and violence to keep members of the Amish community in line—and to line their own pockets. While some of the stories were based loosely on actual events, the group itself was a complete fabrication. Its members were played by ex-Amish and ex-Mennonite young adults acting out scenarios concocted by the show's producers. What is most extraordinary about Amish Mafia is that, even though it was fictional, it was cleverly constructed to appear real. Discovery Channel, which aired it, assiduously maintained that it was real; whole episodes were devoted to proving that it was real; and many viewers (including smart reality TV fans) were fooled into believing it was real. In Fooling with the Amish, Dirk Eitzen examines the fakery in Amish Mafia and how actual viewers of the show responded to it to discover answers to two questions that have long puzzled media scholars: What is it about the so-called reality of reality shows that appeals to and gratifies viewers? How and why are people taken in by falsehoods in the media? Eitzen's ultimate answer to these questions is that, in taking liberties with facts, Amish Mafia works very much like gossip. This helps to explain the workings not just of this and other reality TV shows but also of other forms of media fakery, including fake news.The book winds through numerous fascinating case studies of media fakery, from P. T. Barnum's famous humbugs of the nineteenth century to recent TV news scandals. It examines the social and emotional appeals of other forms of entertaining fakery, including professional wrestling and supermarket tabloids. It explains how and why conventions of contrivance evolved in reality TV as well as the ethics of media fakery. And, for readers interested in the Amish, it tells how the ex-Amish stars of Amish Mafia got involved in the show and the impact that involvement had on their lives.
eBook
Something real
Since the cancellation of her family's reality television show, seventeen-year-old Bonnie Baker, one of twelve siblings, has tried to live a normal life with real friends and a possible boyfriend, until her mother and the show's producers decide to bring \"Baker's Dozen\" back on the air.
Book
The Makeover
The first book to consider the rapid rise of makeover
shows from the perspectives of their viewers 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.
eBook
A companion to reality television
International in scope and more comprehensive than existing collections, this book 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.
Book
Crimesploitation
\"Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised.\" Most of us have encountered this warning while watching television at some point. It is typically attached to a brand of reality crime TV that Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance call \"crimesploitation\": spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting \"real\" criminal behavior and its consequences. This book examines their enduring popularity in American culture. Analyzing the structure and content of several popular crimesploitation shows, including Cops, Dog: The Bounty Hunter, and To Catch a Predator, as well as newer examples like Making a Murderer and Don't F**K with Cats, Kaplan and LaChance highlight the troubling nature of the genre: though it presents itself as ethical and righteous, its entertainment value hinges upon suffering. Viewers can imagine themselves as deviant and ungovernable like the criminals in the show, thereby escaping a law-abiding lifestyle. Alternatively, they can identify with law enforcement officials, exercising violence, control, and \"justice\" on criminal others. Crimesploitation offers a sobering look at the depictions of criminals, policing, and punishment in modern America.
eBook