User:Niek Hilkmann/Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies 2012/2013/Synopsis - Oulette & Hay - Better living through reality TV

Oulette & Hay - Better living through reality TV

TV Constitutions of citizenship

This chapter considers reality TV as a resource for constituting households, neighbourhoods and other spheres of everyday government. The term ‘constitution’ is used to refer to television’s role in enacting and shaping spaces and populations. The text focuses on programs that stress the multiplicity and diversity of private constitutions through which governance is made rational and administered. Oulette & Hay describe several models, strategies and constitutions of group government. This particular chapter considers how “technologies of the self” or “self-constitution” are about the rules and techniques for becoming a good member of a group.

The two basic elements that can be found within Reality TV concerning these matters are social/behavioural experiments and the trial of particular subjects. In programs with an “experimental” basis the concept of group governance is reinvented and the ingredients of good, active and effective citizenship are reformulated. This can happen for instance, through the interaction between various populations, “value-subcultures” and lifestyle-clusters. When the program is “trial”-orientated, the subject of the show is exposed to “a rite of passage” in which he or she is forced to reconsider and exercise abilities and responsibilities in relation to rules, so as to become a good citizen. Personally constituted rules by “domestic managers” are being reconsidered.

When an element of competition is added to the show, self-reliant citizenship (meaning the most self-actualizing subject) is often rewarded. This brings about a paradox of self-interest in relation to team playing. The “winner” needs to be a leader rather than a dependent onlooker, though clearly, the game’s objective is also to underscore that only one player can be selected to lead the other “citizens”. In that way freedom is reinstituted as the “natural condition” of man at the cost of participating socially in a group.

Playing TV’s Democracy Game

This chapter is an effort to consider the paradoxes of an emancipated, self-creating media citizen and a “participatory media culture”. Furthermore, a different set of questions is asked about media power and consumers’ agency. This is all in order to imagine an alternative path to political reform through media citizenship and to acknowledge what is difficult about this path.

First, the concept of democracy is regarded. TV is recognised as a complicated democratic form and practice in itself. The personal or collective freedoms of media interactivity involve a form of self-government that is authorized by a current reasoning about citizenship and civic participation. The active (or “interactive”) citizen is an objective of current efforts to reinvent liberal government. Democracy as “self-government” is reliant upon the technical procedures that mediate the government of the self. With these considerations in mind there is no authentic form of democracy that TV has veiled or perverted as spectacle.

Democracy is not another instance of false consciousness formed through TV as political/ideological spectacle; it is an achievement that occurs through specific techniques, experiments and demonstrations in which members and citizens “enter into their government”. TV is more than just a representation and staging of participation in group governance. Reality TV series’ experiments and games in group governance, as tests of alliances and alliance-building, help rationalize a broader investment by contemporary TV in membership as a requisite for democratic participation. Rationalizing participation in respect to a society or a larger group matters.

It is interesting how mass democracy is made rational and technically conducted, when the injection for a kind of TV that is “of, by and for the people” occurs through plurization and mass customization of “popular” constitutions and though experiments that are as much about failure and setbacks as about provisional success. Procedures and technologies of participation and “interactivity” pertain to a current governmental rationality about citizenship and bout the necessary procedures and experiments of democracy. One of democracy’s current paradoxes is that the political process is diffuse but that certain technologies and procedures cross over and are shared between public and private enactment and democracy. By enacting democracy through private associations only certain citizen/members get to operate these technologies and to vote who is included and who is excluded.