User:Laura Macchini/thesisOutline

Thesis Outline

fil rouge : index

1. Intro
   1. Abstract
2. Voyeurism & Exhibitionism: interested in the lives of others
3. Participation in Talk Shows and Reality TV Series
4. Post Reality TV: Imitating the professional entertainment Industry
5. Confessions
6. Oversharing: privacy and a new notion of public space
7. Reaching out: a new concept of Community
8. the Eternal Praise of User Generated Content: Why is it so important for the capitalist society that users keep generating content?

Expanded Items / Reorganized Annotations

Intro

My graduation project revolves around confessional youtube videos. The videos I use deal with topics such as sexual abuse, sex change operations, cancer, drug related problems, alcoholism, eating disorders, loss of a loved one, etc. The project itself consists of a mashup of videos: a series of playlists, streaming from youtube, that will be influenced by the audience's behavior Different playlists refer to the nature of the information given by the protagonists of the videos: there is an 'introduction' level, in which people greet their audience and, for instance, state their name. Other levels refer to the kind of 'intimacy' that would be required to discuss a certain subject in a generic relationship. The goal of my installation is to explore the patterns of confession in videoblogs, to create multiple environments for the visitor to experience those videos in different ways.

In my project I made various assumptions: this text is an attempt to address - if not all - at least some of them.

Abstract

In this thesis I would like to to shed some light on why confessional videoblogging exists in the first place, also identify and explain some of the reasons why people would decide to talk publicly about their private life; in conclusion I will trace a connection between interests that the users and the capitalist society have for user-generated content to be constantly produced and updated. The goal of this text is ultimately to explore the source of the need to be exposed, the collapse of personal privacy that is especially prominent in confessional culture.

Voyeurism & Exhibitionism: interested in the lives of others

The first, and perhaps biggest assumption I made, necessary to realize my project, is the existance of a secret desire, that people have, to share personal details of our life with one another. Sharing can seem (and is) an essential component to human interaction and relationships, but its existance in the media has radically changed shape in the last century.

Clay Calvert, in his Voyeur Nation (2000), duly noted "Culture [...] has [...] evolved or devolved into a culture of mediated voyeurism - a culture that values watching electronic images of other people's private and revealing moments, especially those that are sordid and sensational or simply strange and unusual".

Voyeuristic and Exhibitionistic tendencies, ever present in today’s reality TV shows, magazines, and Computer Mediated Interactions, can be traced as far back as the end of the 19th century.

"The electronic voyeurism present today in realit-based television shows, shockumentaries, newsmagazines, and tell-all talk shows can be traced back at least to the ages of yellow and jazz journalism".

The period between 1880s and the beginning of the 20th century was famous for sensationalism in media, in an attempt to attract new readers from the lower classes. The interest in personal lives of famous people can be observed as early as the 1870s, when the first mass publications appeared, and the public demanded the first articles about them [Amy H.]. In the same years the change in America from a mainly producing to a consuming society, the culture "tilted inward, away from character and toward personality, and self-realization rather than selfless public virtue". [A.H.]

"Pulitzer used technology to extend a tradition of voyeuristic illustrations that dates back at least to 1823, when the Illustrated London News used [...] illustrations of a murder. [...] This was not a far cry from the death-on-camera of Ruth Snyder 100 years later i 1928 or the death videotape of Thomas Youk in 1998"

"The mass media of late 1920s transformed the relationshop between Americans and their public figures. Capitalizing on professional sports, network radio, and Hollywood motion pictures, the press and its syndicated gossip columnists produced a desire to know the renowned - who they were how they lived and what they thought" [Hemingway and his Conspirators: Hollywood Scribners,and the Making of American Celebrity Culture - LeonardLeff - Rowmanand Littlefield, 19970]

"In an early quest for self-definition, Americans of the Revolutionary republic sought to derive a mythic national character by focusing on military heroes, romantic fictional protagonists, and eminent statesmen who embodied the ideals of virtue and self-reliance. By mid-twentieth century, the pedestal belonged not to politicians and generals but to baseball players and movie stars" [Amy Henderson]

"By the turn of the century, for example, the proliferating tabloid papers routinely ran feature stories about the marital infidelities, courtship, purchases and pastimes of Broadway stars."

“In the later nineteenth century, with the revolution in communications technology and the creation of a mass urban landscape, that our heroic vision was altered. The face of fame changed with what Daniel Boorstin called the “Graphic Revolution”, the advent, that is, both of mechanical means of image reproduction and of facilities for mass dispersion of information.

"The network propagates and disseminates video voyeurism, nurturing a new generation on the ways of watching others' lives unfold."

"We live in a celebrity driven culture and television provides a chance to be a celebrity. The chance to feel important- to be in the spotlight- thus has an inherent appeal."

"fame is just a computermounted (sic) camera away"

"[The hero] is a man or woman of great deeds ... The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media" [Boorstin 49,61]

"celebrities might serve as useful flashpoints for any discussion about mass mediation and the role of the audience in creating meanings from the images produced in context of consumer capitalism"

"The notion of celebrity is dominated by an idea of falsity, by calculated performance, and by the routine faliure of audiences and the celebrated themselves to distinguish between well-known personae and the more real or true selves that exist offstage"

"does it make theoretical sense to separate the [...] real from the inauthentic, in the context of developed consumer capitalism?"

"we might embrace the postmodern arguments of a theorist such as Jean Baudrillard, who describes a brave new world in which the concept of originality, authenticity, and real-world social referentiality become irrelevant."

"it would be possible to understand any given celebrity as one of Baudrillard's simulacra, as existing in an inescapable system that facilitates the pleasures of consumption."

"The celebrity signifies most importantly the triumph of unreality, but the question of whose interests are privileged within the world of the image and how they came to be dominant are less important than the fact of the imagistic world itself."

It remains very important to examine the influence of the "culture industry" to understand the shift between celebrity - reality-tv and social media.

"While celebrity was something that mass audiences were encouraged to aspire to (McCraken, 1 989), the world of celebrities was fundamentally removed from that of the audience."

"[The hero] is a man or woman of great deeds ... The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media" [Boorstin 49,61]

"celebrities might serve as useful flashpoints for any discussion about mass mediation and the role of the audience in creating meanings from the images produced in context of consumer capitalism"

"Contemporary societies were long accustomed to interacting with completely "mediated" identities. [...] Many people may see photos of [...] Heidi Klum more frequently than photos of distant friends or family members."

Participation in Talk Shows and Reality TV Series

"Spectatorship of other's lives [...] is increasingly paramount in our mediated, must-see TV lives. But television is not the only medium today on which our voyeuristic society preys. Evolutions in technology have introduced new, more intense, and even more intrusive an persuasive forms of voyeurism than at any time in history."

In the early 90s MTV premiered the hit series The Real World: seven young men and women, whose ages vary from nineteen from twentyfive were selected from more than 500 people auditioning to participate. They shared a fancy four-bedroom loft in SoHo, Manhattan for thirteen weeks, in exchange for their privacy. Their interactions were recorded with cameras spread everywhere in the apartment, and microphones were worn by the participants, as well as placed in the rooms.

"the revolving door of characters works because the series' appeal is the irresistible pull of watching lives, any lives, unfold without a script [...] Dipping in and out of other people's lives is precisely what the current television culture is all about" [Caryn James, 1998] [Caryn James, "The Eighth Roommate: A Camera," New York Times, June 16, 1998, p. E9.0]

"Tell-all television talk shows like The Jerry Spinger Show and Ricki feature guests who routinely make revelations about their private lives that titilate or infuriate both the studio audience and the audience of voyeurs watching at home."

"Tell-all talk shows such as those hosted by Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake allow us to dip voyeuristically into the sordid, private details of others' lives. Yet whether these shows in fact convey the truth about real people sometimes is suspect"

"Allegations that the fights and arguments between guests [...] on the Jerry Springer Show are staged have floated for a long time."" "The shows are also criticized for sometimes letting individuals get on television who face or make up their stories"

"The private eccentricities of ordinary citizens are revealed on Oprah and PrimeTime Live, where they become substitutes for real conversation about real problems." [Ellen Hume, Director of Democracy Project at the Public Broadcasting Service]

"Voyeuristic tell-all talk shows like those hosted by Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake test and push our conception of and beliefs about privacy"

"From murder to incest, crime and punishment, almost no boundaries exist between wat can and cannot be said in public. No revelation, confession, or disclosure is so personal that it cannot be exposed by a talk show host. In this atmosphere of total exposure, no secrets are allowed"

"Talks shows give us glimpses of what are purpoted to be real people with representative problems from which we can learn to live our own lives."

Post Reality TV: Imitating the professional entertainment Industry

In the early Internet era of Computer Mediated Communications (CMC), nobody knew you were a dog, or a middle aged Australian cross-dresser, for the matter. When maintaining a personal videoblog on Youtube, on the other hand, the wagging tail and the facial hair might give away your true nature. Contemporary CMC technologies, such as video sharing platforms, or classic Social Network websites, tend to encourage to consolidate one’s online identity with the offline (real) one, rather than suggesting that their users experiment with fictional personas.

"Our voyeurism may be as simple as watching the home movies of others' lives and knowing that we could be "the star of the next show."

"Despite this criticism, it appears that one social force driving the voyeurism of tell-all talk shows is the fact that guests are real people [...] not movie stars."

"Celebrity fans use communication technologies to interact with their idols in many ways"

"The authors argue that the normative and behavioral distinction between the celebrity world and the everyday world eroded, and that the dissolution of this boundary is observable in two distinct trends: the development and explosive popularity of so-called reality television (RTV), and the concomitant adoption of Web 2.0 technologies like social networking sites (SNSs) that allow individuals to be identified by and communicate with mass-scale audiences."

"The transformation of regular people into celebrities whose every move is worthy of a mass audience's attention was a powerful concept." "actors engage in 'confessions' where they ritualistically disclose their private thoughts and feelings to the broadcast audience. Blogs and other easily accessible communication platforms [...] have likewise enabled a growing number of Internet users to publish their thoughts, photos and videos on the Web"

"Taken together, RTV and Web 2.0 set the stage for a major shift in the way individuals perceive their role in the contemporary media environment. Rather than simply being targeted by media messages they can see themselves as protagonists of mediated narratives who actively integrate themselves into a complex media ecosystem"

"The media tools and strategies employed by celebrities and their handlers [...] are now in a sense available to everyone, and increasingly are employed in everyday interpersonal interaction."

"Viewers are operationalized as active processors of television content who learn and model behavior portrayed in television programming." "Results suggest that social behaviors commonly associated with celebrities are now enacted by non-celebrities in an increasingly mediated social environment"

"development of social media platforms enables non-media professionals, or normal people to participate in a newly accessible media environment, not just as an audience member, but also as multimedia producers"

"There appears to be substantial congruence between Web 2.0's culture of personal self-disclosure and the reality culture that dominates some segments of the television market. Recent research on blogging, for example, operationalizes disclosures via personal-journal style blogs as non-directed in nature (Stefanone & Jang, 2007), analogous to behavior typified by the RTV genre wherein characters engage in confessional style disclosures to view."

"the characters in RTV programming serve as models, and the Web 2.0 environment provides a new context for enacting observed behavior."

"One of RTV's strongest messages regards non-directed self disclosure, where personal revelations are not targeted towards specific, individual others, but rather targeted to an abstract audience. As the personal thoughts of the characters are not (yet) directly accessible to the viewing audience, the narrative structure of many RTV shows requires the characters to transgress traditional boundaries of privacy, a sacrifice they are happy to make."

"For most of their history the media were the domain of those who were, by definition, celebrities. With the wide scale adoption of media sharing, blogging, and SNSs, a much broader range of people now have the capability of creating mediated identities."

"reality television programming presents a consistent set of values and behaviors related to self-disclosure."

"There appears to be substantial congruence between Web 2.0's culture of personal self-disclosure and the reality culture that dominates some segments of the television market. Recent research on blogging, for example, operationalizes disclosures via personal-journal style blogs as non-directed in nature (Stefanone & Jang, 2007), analogous to behavior typified by the RTV genre wherein characters engage in confessional style disclosures to view."

"the characters in RTV programming serve as models, and the Web 2.0 environment provides a new context for enacting observed behavior."

"One of RTV's strongest messages regards non-directed self disclosure, where personal revelations are not targeted towards specific, individual others, but rather targeted to an abstract audience. As the personal thoughts of the characters are not (yet) directly accessible to the viewing audience, the narrative structure of many RTV shows requires the characters to transgress traditional boundaries of privacy, a sacrifice they are happy to make."

"For most of their history the media were the domain of those who were, by definition, celebrities. With the wide scale adoption of media sharing, blogging, and SNSs, a much broader range of people now have the capability of creating mediated identities."

Confessions

"The value placed on speaking, telling a story, is perhaps one of the most important elements of the definition of confession."

"one similarity between confession and testimony is the way in which both forms of personal speaking are assumed to make you feel better."

"the notion of the 'talking cure' is shared by advocates of access television - simply allowing ordinary people to speak is good for them and good for us."

"but confessoin isn't just about speaking, it's about speaking to somone - an interlocutor. Drawing on the words of Foucault, Michel Renov argues that: one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile."

the camera in most video-confession assumes the role of the interlocutor that Renov is talking about.

"Another aspect of confession, like testimony is that it requires revelation of the hidden or denied"

"Confession, it has been argued, implies measurement against a norm and confessions to deviations from that norm. As Michael Renov summarizes: 'confession required submission to authority, divine or secular' (1996: 79)"

"What is fascinating [...] is the way trivial violations of a personal ethical code are narrated in the style of a confession. In the words of Peter Brooks, the confessional style of /Video Nation/ seems to signal 'an acceptance of the banality of guilt' (2000: 166). This narrative pattern emerges repeatedly, whether the subject matter is serious or comic."

Oversharing: privacy and a new notion of public space

"The more accepting we are of having our own behavior visually monitored and recorded, the more our comfort level with watching others' activities increases. If I can be watched, in other words, then we certainly should be able to do some watching of our own."

Possible reasons for oversharing: -self clarification (focus attention in preparation of speaking about themselves to others) -social validation (advice or feedback about the correctness of their beliefs, and ethics) - relationship development (for the purpose of interpersonal exchange) - social control (influence others' opinion)

"One of the major social forces driving voyeurism is our changing conception of what information should remain closed and private, and, concomitantly what information should be made open and available to the public."

"As our expectations of privacy decrease, our expectations for receiving more information - our expectations of what is public - increase. Everything becomes a game for voyeuristic viewing pleasure."

"The sanctity of privacy has been eroded by the increasing intrusion of the technology of surveillance" [Susan J.Ducker & Gary Gumpert]

"All of this, of course, influences our expectations of privacy. Our expectations of privacy are reduced"

"What once were personal and private tragedies now unfold in real time and in public view with nonstop media coverage."

"In April 1999, cameras captured live the panic and grieving of students who witnessed death face to face at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Reportes interviewed students immediately after the worst incident of violence in a high school in U.S. history"

"We consume so much media fare today that we have little opportunity in our own lives to face the type of challenges that give meaning to one's life. We can, however, try to identify with [...] those who face such challenges on television."

"We can speculate on what we would do in similar circumstances. We can learn from their reactions what we would or would not want to do."

"Our desire to watch and the willingness of others to be watched suggests that notions of privacy are shifting and that our sense of individualism is in a state of decline as we desire to live our lives 'watched' by others. Our sense of self is fulfilled by others watching our actions."

"Ultimately, this generation comes to accept as normal and takes for granted the presence of cameras. Far from fearing the prying presence of the lens, a new generation longs to live its life out in the full view for all to see."

"today we are voyeurs perhaps because we hope to learn something about ourselves, our society, and our own place or places in that society. We strive to learn what truth and reality are in our mediated, jump-cut world by watching others."

The only problem is: how can we succeed in this quest for truth if the reality we base our learning experience on is the highly mediated one of Reality TV? One possible answer explains the shift we have witnessed between Tv and Social Media, they look more authentic, less "mediated", but as we will see they are most definitely just as mediated.

"Bente and Feist refer to this genre as affect TV, which presents viewers with the most private stories of non-prominent people to a mass audience, crossing traditional borders of privacy and intimacy (2000, p.114)"

"the emphasis on the intimate and the personal in public discussions have 'hollowed out' the public sphere"

"Rather than imagining an ideal public sphere in which anyone can participate on equal terms by setting aside personal concerns, emotions and differences to discuss in a rational way matters of common interest, Fraser (1996) argues that public spheres always include or exclude people. A key example is the exclusion of women from the newspapers and coffee houses that constituted Jürgen Habermas's burgeois public sphere."

"Fraser proposes that we aknowledge a range of public spheres, or counter-publics, where different groups are enabled to debate issues of common concerns. Because these counter-publics acknowledge the inevitability of differences between participants, in such spaces it is not necessary to leave your personal concerns and identities at the door."

bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

• Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin - Listening Post
• Geert Mul - Match of the Day
• Lernert & Sander - I Love Alaska
• Ondi Timoner - We Live in Public
• Laurie Ouellette & James Hay - Better Living through Reality TV
• David Shields - Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
• Jon McKenzie - Perform or Else
• Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes - Because We Are Visual
• Erving Goffman - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Jorinde Seijdel, Liesbeth Melis - Open 19: Beyond Privacy: New Perspectives on the Public and Private Domains
• Geert Lovink, Rachel Somers Miles - Video Vortex Reader II
• Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer - Video Vortex Reader I
• Andrew Keen - The Cult of the Amateur
• Don Trapscott - Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World
• Amy Henderson - Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture.
• Stefanone, M., Lackaff, D. & Rosen, D. - The Relationship between Traditional Mass Media and “Social Media”
• Calvert, Clay - Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in modern culture

Thesis Plan (and Timetable)

• selecting and examining the sources of each item of my index
• writing a brief synopsis for each item
• expanding on the synopsis of the items
• organize my annotation by subject/chapter
• paraphrase quotes and assign them to a chapter
• link everything together in a coherent discourse

8000 words long thesis
budget every chapter / paragraphs
isolating the source
making a wordcount