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Better Living Through Reality TV

by Susan Murray, Laurie Ouelette

TV's Constitutions of Citizenship

Television became important for the administration of the neo-liberal policies in the US: this book was published just before Obama's election. A government that wants citizens to take more responsibility for their lives, a government of the self, and for social services to be privatized.

Chapter five is about how Reality TV, by broadcasting games and social experiments, demonstrates group governance - examples of government in daily life. Group governance has many frameworks: for example a household, a university or a neighborhood. Reality television shows the citizen-viewer how citizen-players or citizen-subjects should act within these constitutions.

Some interesting examples are used. Supernanny, where a 'governess' demonstrates how a household should be run. Welcome To The Neighborhood, a televised contest where one of seven families wins a house in perfect suburbia by winning over the neighbors. The wannabe-neighbors from a variety of cultural and economical backgrounds are tested, but so are the future neighbors: are they able to govern a variety of issues? This draws a nice parallel with actual Homeowners Societies, just as likely to govern their neighborhoods using games and tests. This example is made more interesting by the fact that the show was canceled, because a large number of institutions raised concern. Turning the discussion from "What makes a good neighbor?" to "What is Good TV?".

The show Survivor (and in a less Darwinian, but more commercial way, The Apprentice) is used as another example to demonstrate how TV experiments with group governance. Contestants (citizens) are isolated in remote wilderness, where they form tribes and compete for cash. Contestants are tested on their ability to be self-sufficient enough to be a useful member of a team. Paradoxically, only one citizen can win! Murray and Ouelette see this as a mirror to the the liberal movement. Be a leader! Only one can be the leader!

Other TV-shows demonstrate these principles using social experiments. There are wives swapping households, citizens swapping skin color: how do they uphold their own "rules and guidebook" in a different surrounding?

Playing TV's Democracy Game

Democracy uses technical procedures that allow citizens to govern themselves. Chapter six delves deeper in the technologies that are used by TV-shows to test group- and self-governance.

First, the technologies of counting, where viewers participate and interact with TV-shows. It starts with the increasing number of channels viewers can pick from and easily navigate with their remote controls. Then there is the ratings, counting who is watching what. And the viewers' ability to participate in the outcome of a show by voting. Public and private government intersected when president Bush invited American Idol contestants to the White House. The procedures of democracy spread out over daily life. A TV channel for every different lifestyle cluster is available, which has helped motivate viewers to vote in the presidential campaign. There is another parallel: both national and televised voting requires a membership or subscription, only members of the group decide who's in and who's out.

Another commonly used technology is the extension of public institutions (the hospital or courtroom, the weather or NASA) to the TV screen, forging a relationship between government and citizen. The Bush administration even tried this strategy in Iraq to shape a new "civic society": a twice daily broadcast of actual prisoners confessing their crimes, and encouraging viewers to act as a jury.

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Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are

by James Harkin

Chapter: Peer Pressure

James Harkin's Cyburbia links internet to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. It discusses our present internet culture and how it has transformed the way we live. The chapter Peer Pressure focuses on the effect of our peers in the second coming of the internet. Norbert Wiener envisioned cybernetics a society where we are human nodes firing off messages and adjusting ourselves to feedback in an information loop that never ends.

The internet began as a small collection of static websites, but around the millennium it grew to a web of sites populated by ordinary users. Decentralised file-sharing sites became increasingly popular: peer-to-peer communication without authority. After that came Google, eBay, blogs and finally, social networking sites. Harkin sees this mass migration to social networking communities like Facebook as a social movement. Users sign up to have unmediated, authentic experiences with their online peers, without any need for a government or control.

Cybernetics are evident in the workings of Facebook, as human nodes we are the infrastructure of the social network and our friendships make the connections. Network theorists were right all along, the relationships between people are just as important as those people themselves. The effects of sharing information peer-to-peer are not necessarily positive, it's power can be used to virally spread falsehoods online. Internet users want to communicate with equals and to have control over what they watch, read and listen to. They spend their free time observing others and exhibiting themselves. Though not always a good thing, it is easy to find like minded people online. But we are still experiencing information through an electronic medium.

At the same time Facebook is mapping the weak ties between internet users, Google has become a map-maker of the relationships between the billion pieces of information found online. It's search engine algorithm PageRank ranks pages by how many hyperlinks exist that point at it. And just by using Google search we help to improve it - like a feedback loop it registers our activity and uses it to determine the best destinations on the web. But it is prone to misuse as 'search engine optimisation firms' buy up links to route traffic in any direction. This shows that the peer-to-peer network is not without flaws. In traditional media we could rely on cultural taste makers to sift through all the material available to us. Online we depend on our peers and we tend to go around in circles, visiting their favourite links and adding them to our own list. As almost everyone is both a user of and contributor to the content found online, tagging was introduced to attract and direct visitors. In the case of blogging, this has resulted in some mutual back-slapping. It is almost impossible for newcomers to find an audience, as this audience is constantly being send back and forth between veteran blogs.

Research has shown that people tend to like songs better if other people liked them first. So the people who arrived first and their early decisions find themselves in a spiral of continued popularity. Our taste and the decisions we make based on them, depend on other people's earlier selections. A self-perpetuating feedback loop. "What is popular becomes more popular: the online pecking order has been decided awhile ago."

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Wild Images: The Rise of Amateur Images in the Public Domain

by Jorinde Seijdel

Seijdel's text is about the effect of the amateur photographer and their current, aided by digital media and the internet, role in a professional media landscape.

The subject is introduced via the example of the 'Iraqi prisoner torture' images taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, made public in April 2004. And displayed in an exhibition called 'Inconvenient Evidence' only a month later. 'Wild images', taken by amateurs and never meant to be made public, on display.

Wild stands for images that are not controlled or edited and have a savage and barbaric nature. These Abu Ghraib images in particular 'escaped' the censorship of the Bush administration and led to questions being asked about the implications of user-made democratized images used in journalistic reports.

Susan Sontag, quoted in the text, noticed a shift. A picture is no longer a keep safe, but has evolved into something that "disseminates and circulates". Banning these wild images is so difficult, because they could be made by literally anyone: the boundaries and rules of the professional news media are not set for the amateur photographer. This results in images being circulated in a very liberating and democratic way, but they're also more explicit, savage and perverse. Especially in the case of accidents, disasters and wars we've become a society that wants to "consume events" from everywhere, while they're happening. We're a very professional public: less a participant, more a recorder or a performer. We're either taking pictures or being photographed.

We record events, but we also re-enact them, to the point where we, maybe not on purpose, are imitating images or at least always aware of the possibility of our actions being broadcasted.

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The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination

by Jos de Mul

How has art, in an 'age of informatization', been transformed by reproduction, the computer interface, the database?

Jos de Mul starts his text by referring to Walter Benjamin, a cultural philosopher who published an essay in 1936 about the transformative effect of mechanical reproduction. And about how the act of reproducing has become an art, or the 'dominant cultural interface'. Benjamin uses the word 'aura' for a work of art that is authentic, unique and placed in a time in history. Print, photography and film, ways of mechanical reproduction, induce a 'radical loss of aura'. But on the positive side, reproduction has made art widely available or accessible, a political tool to mobilize the public.

Benjamin wrote about mechanical reproduction, de Mul writes about Digital Recombination: the 'combining, decombining and recombining' of pieces of data in a database. Not only the database as part of a computer, but also the idea of a database as a metaphor of our own experience of reality.

Databases have developed over time: from inflexible and 'flat', like a phonebook, to wiki's and other online Web 2.0 applications. Today, the computer is the dominant technology, with databases as the dominant cultural configuration. Anything cultural or natural can be recombined. Genetic experiments on animals or an interactive archive of historical photography. De Mul states that all these possibilities can bring about a 'return of aura'. Especially when users are capable of changing and sharing the content of a database, they become part of its virtuality: a performance art.

Benjamin discussed the value of an exhibited object, 'exhibition value' and how an emphasis on this can change or create new functions of the object. And not just objects, as he prophesied that the success of political figures will greatly depend on their exhibition value. De Mul thinks that in this age of digital recombination politicians are becoming more dependent on their manipulation power. Manipulating elections, recombining propaganda. A work of art can only be political when it not only manipulates politics, but also 'reflects on the politics of manipulation'.