The selected reality TV programme for assessment to be done on is **Big Brother**
A program and episode summary is required (max. 500 words). At beginning of assessment.
Analyse the program in terms of the way it produces ‘reality’ through the mediation and construction of ‘real life’ situations, use of narrative and documentary techniques, and technological reflexivity. In your analysis, use terms and concepts drawn from Tutorial 10, such as documentary realism, simulation, simulacrum, the play of fact/fiction, hyperconsciousness, myth, tabloidization, celebrity, postmodernism. Other terms can be used as well. Your analysis must be informed by reference to a specific episode). You must make reference to and use at least 6 scholarly articles and/or books drawn from the unit and may be supplemented with wider reading. Word count is 1500 for this section.
You are required to write an essay of 1500 words responding to one of the questions in the following list. You are also required to write a separate 500 word episode or program summary (as indicated in the question), to be placed at the beginning of the assignment. Your essay and summary must be written in an academic format, and be referenced according to the Griffith Reference Guide, You must not use internet sites as sources of information for quoting or reference in your essay. You must use terms and concepts from specific tutorials indicated in each respective question. You can also draw from any of the material presented in the unit including all of the study guide, text book, set readings and articles and books in the reference lists, as well as any wider reading that you may wish to undertake, keeping in mind that references must always be to articles and books published in academic journals and by academic book publishers. In some questions you will be required to show evidence of wider reading. Please note that the internet should only be used as a tool to guide preliminary research and for gaining access to any scholarly material. DO NOT USE INTERNET MATERIAL IN YOUR ESSAY.
INFORMATION FROM THE STUDY GUIDE –
SECTION TO BE REFERENCED AS -10.2 reality tv and simulation
The production of reality by television can be understood in terms of technologies for reproducing audio-visual material through cameras and transmission devices. Digital technology, with its mathematical organisation of bits of information that produces an infinitely malleable and manipulable image, usurps the authority of the older analogue image to summon up reality in a seemingly straightforward way. The digital era brings with it uncertainty about the ability of the media to represent reality directly and truthfully. Digital images seem to conjure up a world that mixes reality with fiction, often confusing one with the other (for example the recent popularity of ‘fake news’ in social media: fictionalised news events passed off as real). The world of digital imagery produces a sense of longing for the real, seemingly lost in the digitised displays. Reality TV can be understood as a response to this sense of longing for the real, a sense of direct contact with reality seemingly lost in the digital age: ‘the proliferation of reality TV could be understood as a euphoric effort to reclaim what seems to be lost after digitization … The powerful urge for a sense of contact with the real is inscribed in much reality TV footage.’ (Fetveit, p. 798).
Reality tv is a simulation of reality. It copies real events by blurring the distinction between the original and the copy. Simulations become the norm in the media when analogue technology is replaced by digital technology. Digitised media encourages a culture of simulation in which images take on the status of reality (Sturken and Cartwright, p. 212). The philosopher Jean Baudrillard has proposed the concept of the simulacrum which helps to explain this phenomenon. A simulacrum is an event in which it is impossible to tell the difference between the original and its copy; that is, between its sign and its referent. The sign replaces the referent as the source of event’s meaning, thereby confusing the status of the reality of the event. As an example, Baudrillard offers Disneyland: ‘the Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real’ (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 25). As a simulacrum, Disneyland takes over the status of the real America; one must go to the false world of Disneyland in order to experience the real America. Baudrillard’s point is not that Disneyland is a false image of America, as if the true America lay waiting for anyone not seduced by the enticements of Disneyland, but that America itself – its real, authentic existence – can only be experienced as an inauthentic image. A simulated reality is not false, but true/false. Through simulation, events are rendered hyperreal, more real than reality itself. Reality tv can be analysed as a simulated reality; it offers an experience not of reality, but of the real as simultaneously true and false, factual and fictional, informational and entertaining.
STUDY GUIDE INFORMATION REFFERENCE AS – 10.4 TECHNOLOGICAL REFLEXITY
Reality TV is a format that reflexes on its own mode of presentation. Sturken and Cartwright describe reflexivity in the following way:
The practice of making viewers aware of the means of production by incorporating them into the content of the cultural product was often a feature of modernism [the style of film and culture from the late 1950s to the 1980s]. In most modern work [e.g. modernist ‘art films’ of the 1960s], this was a strategy used by artists as a form of political critique that asked viewers to notice the structure of the show in order to distance them from the surface pleasures of the text. This idea of distancing is an important one because means viewers can be engaged at a critically conscious level. … Reflexivity, in which the text refers to its own means of production, undermines the illusion or fantasy aspects of the narrative, encouraging the viewer to be a critical thinker about the ideology conveyed by the narrative. Sturken and Cartwright, p. 322)
Here Sturken and Cartwright identify a key technique of modernist dramaturgical practice (the arts of performance including stage, film, television, but also literature) designed to unsettle the viewer and make her think about the status of the program that she is watching and her relation to it. They go on to argue that in postmodern culture (that which comes after modernism – the culture from the 1980s up until the present), modernist reflexivity was emptied of its political potential and instead became an intellectual ‘play’, where media producers offer us reflexive techniques of disillusionment not as tools for critical and distancing reflection on the real economic and cultural conditions behind the text bit as forms of intellectual play [for instance in advertisements that play with their own status as real].
Follow Sturken and Cartwright, technological reflexivity can be understood as ‘the practice of making viewers aware of the [technical] means of production [of the program] by incorporating them into the content of the cultural product’. For instance the British Reality TV program Top Gear reverts to a reflexive mode when it starts to become more concerned with its mode of presentation (e.g. with the types of equipment used to film the program, and with the presenters themselves – e.g. their quarrels with one another), than with what it is actually being presented. Instead of estranging the viewer from the content in order to provide the viewer with critical distance (as is the case with modernist reflexivity), the reflexivity here tries to endear the viewer to the program by projecting a sense of false intimacy and over-familiarity that this is ‘just a program’ and a ‘don’t take it too seriously’ attitude.
In one of your readings for this tutorial, Arild Fetveit discusses the Norwegian program Real TV which features a live air crash between two planes caught on video. He points out how the program produces a sense of realism drawn from a reflexion on the camera technology itself: ‘Here the evidental power of the cameras that are capturing ‘every single moment’ has become the main issue. The focus is not so much on presenting a story of an air crash, as on presenting the audio-visual evidence showing us what really happened in that decisive moment when the planes crash. The function of the camera is close to that of a scientific instrument, measuring out the concrete details of the particular instant’ (Fetveit, p. 793). The program’s authority to record reality is drawn not so much from the event that it records, but from act of the recording itself. The event’s importance is downgraded while the program’s status as a recorder of events is given a higher priority. Reality tv no longer regards itself as faithfully documenting events happening in the real world, but as somehow involved in constructing them, making them visible in specific ways, according to certain technical operations. The visibility of the event and the operations that make it available are presented as entirely the product of the medium. The program produces the real by ‘reflexing’ on the medium in which it operates.
Another good example of technological reflexivity is the live telecasting of sporting events, where the play is reproduced through multiple camera angles, replays, close ups and slow motion vision. Here the reality of the sporting event is made visible by the active intervention of the technology, which reshapes the event on its own terms. Watching a football match on television takes on a sense of immediacy far more immersive than going to the game itself.
TEXT BOOK MUST BE USED – Tony Thwaites, Lloyd Davis and Warwick Mules, Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: a Semiotic Approach, London, Palgrave, 2002
Other Academic References to be used-
Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa 2001, Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture, Oxford Univeraity Press, London, p. 366.
Andrejevic, Mark 2008, ‘Reality TV and voyeurism’ in The Tabloid Culture Reader, ed. Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, McGraw Hill, Berkshire, pp. 314-327.
Berger, John 1972, Ways of seeing, BBC/Penguin Books, pp. 7-10, 45-47.
Kaarina Nikunen. (2016) Media, passion and humanitarian reality television. European Journal of Cultural Studies 19:3, pages 265-282.
