User:Laura Macchini/thesisDraft
[disclaimer: this thesis was written listening to Madonna’s discography]
Intro
“I’m already falling apart and I haven’t even started the video yet” 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 will employ a chronological approach, in order to shed some light on why confessional videoblogging exists in the first place, through the rise of Celebrity Culture, Reality Television and Web 2.0 platforms. I will 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 and the desire to watch, the collapse of personal privacy that is especially prominent in confessional culture.
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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".
Celebrity
Voyeuristic and Exhibitionistic tendencies, ever present in today’s reality TV shows, news, magazines, and Computer Mediated Interactions, are profoundly intertwined with the birth of the concept of Celebrity. As opposed to heroes, previously idolized by various civilizations, celebrities have a very different origin, "[The hero] is a man or woman of great deeds ... The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media" [Boorstin 49,61].
“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.” [a.h.]
In the beginning of the 20th century the press, especially the rising popularity of gossip magazines - that were the media at the time - deeply influenced the relationship between the common people and their public figures. In America, in particular, “the pedestal belonged not to politicians and generals, but to baseball players and movie stars” [A.H] “produced a desire to know the renowned - who they were how they lived and what they thought”. Tabloids “routinely ran feature stories about the marital infidelities, courtship, purchases and pastimes of Broadway stars."
As the culture (or Cult) of Celebrity developed through the years, and as a consequence of the rise of the mass media in the first half of the 20th century, celebrities agreed to willingly reveal details about their personal lives, in the hopes of establishing a deeper bond with their audience [A.H]. Confessional-style revelations became a fundamental element in the relationship between Celebrities and their fans: establishing a detailed image of their persona allowed them to become more approachable figures, therefore closer to their fans.
In the context of watching others’ lives unfold, Celebrities demonstrate to be pioneers in broadcasting self-disclosure: in contemporary media, confessional tendencies are a fundamental aspect of a celebrity’s relationship with his audience; the publication - in the sense of making public - of their lives allows them to foster their claim to legitimacy - contrast the idea of “falsity, calculated performance” that characterizes the modern celebrity. By showing that they are real people, with families, children, problems just like everybody else (...) Interestingly enough, the attempt to support their claim to authenticity consists in an even more attentive management of their mediated identity, in which nothing is left to chance.
The amendment of one’s mediated identity, and the publication of one’s personal life experiences evidently came to transcend the celebrity world and descend into people’s hands with the advent of Reality Tv and Web 2.0.
"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"
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."
"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."
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Participation in Talk Shows and Reality TV Series
“truth is stranger than fiction” and therefore, possibly more entertaining.
As we’ve established in the previous chapter we indeed live in a celebrity-driven society, the fundamental appeal of Reality Television programs (and Talk Shows before them) appears evident: the chance to participate, to be in the spotlight.
Exemplar is Calvert’s idea that 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’”.
Furthermore, in a world where fiction has become mass produced, perhaps a way to break the cycle of boredom is to get real: concentrate on the interactions between real peole.
Daytime shows : Dr.Phil, Jerry Springer and Oprah
Daytime shows in the 90s are notable precursors of self-disclosure elements to that of contemporary reality TV programs. I will here concentrate on reality based shows, like The Jerry Springer Show, Dr.Phil, and Oprah, as opposed to celebrity based ones (like The Ellen DeGenres Show) - for the purpose of my argument.
Defined as Tabloid Talk shows, programs like Dr.Phil are famous for their supposed presentation of non-scripted dialogues and interactions between real people - as opposed to actors or movie stars. The Oprah Winfrey Show proved to be so unspeakably influential to motivate the creation of the neologism oprahification, defined as “the perceived increase in people's desire to discuss their emotions or personal problems, attributed to the influence of confessional television programmes” [Harper Collins Neologism Dictionary]
"Voyeuristic tell-all talk shows like those hosted by Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake test and push our conception of and beliefs about privacy"
"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."
"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]
"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"
"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"
Authenticity
On some level, though, whether the experiences recounted by these guests are true or not, it doesn’t really matter: it seems to me that it would speak no less about the voyeuristic/exhibitionistic tendencies of the current society. Even more so, if someone would feel compelled for some reason to come up with a sensationalistic story just to appear on TV - it would serve as evidence for that need to share, that is the subject of this text. Furthermore, the plausibility of a particular - albeit fictitious - story, postulates the existance of similar, real stories, that the imaginary one takes as a model for copy.
"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."
Real Reality Tv and the value of honesty
[the real world road rules big brother survivor]
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. On the topic of The Real World, Caryn James declares: "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, "The Eighth Roommate: A Camera," New York Times, June 16, 1998, p. E9.0]
"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."
"The network propagates and disseminates video voyeurism, nurturing a new generation on the ways of watching others' lives unfold."
“The version of reality that is valorized in such a program is one that can be achieved only through full disclosure. Significantly, the attitude that equates honesty with openness to surveillance is a common attribute of the Road Rules cast.”
“Interestingly, this message seems to have come through loud and clear to the thousands of teens and twenty-somethings who regularly turn up for Bunim-Murray’s open casting calls.”
<honesty> Josh, one of the cast members of Road Rules describes his experience in the show as “I think I got chosen … because I kind of just wear my life on my sleeve- you know what I mean? I really don’t have anything to hide from anybody, I don’t have any skeletons, and I’m a real honest kind.”
“Accorting to coproducer Bunim “We try to cast people that have a natural openness”
Mark Andrejevic, on november 2001, interviewed some aspiring reality TV cast members, almost all of them agreed that the best strategy for getting picked for the show would be to be “open” and “honest” and “be themselves”. “This was apparently the lesson the had learned from watching the show- that what was valorized in the cast members was their honesty.” “All of the would-be cast members unsurprisingly expressed minimal reservations about being watched all the time, with many claiming that they had very little privacy in their lives, and they would eventually become accustomed to being on camera all the time.” in The Real World “self disclosure via surveillance is valorized as authentically ‘real’”
“In short, willing subjection to surveillance on the Big Brother show comes to serve as a demonstration of the strenght of one’s self image- of one’s comfort level with oneself.” “Being ‘real’ was a proof of honesy, and the persistent gaze of the camera provided a way of guaranteeing that ‘reality’”
By associating self-disclosure with the universally accepted virtue of honesty, shows like the Big Brother and Road Rules automatically associate the opposite: resisting the eye of the camera, not accepting one’s life to be monitored, refusing to make one’s life public means having something to hide.
</honesty>
“The celebrity status attained by participants on the show highlights the promise that authentication via surveillance has its tangible rewards. Big Brother’s gaze no longer symbolizes the threat of mass homogeneity but the promise of a paradoxical mass individuation.”
“Reality TV makes the equation explicit: lateral monitoring (viewers watching selected members of the audience) hearkens back to premodem forms of community. Survivor, for example, explicitly invokes the themes of a return to preindustrial, premodem culture,”
“Similarly, Big Brother touts its “back-to-basics” environment and the need of contestants to return—ironically—to an unmediated environment: no mass media, no phones, and no newspapers—only face-to-face interaction.”
==== Governmentality: how to learn to live our lives ==== ?????????
"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."
(maybe I won’t really talk about it)
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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.
Reality TV shows suggest that the trasformation from regular people into celebrities, is very real and certainly possible. All the people made famous by these shows are the living testimony of it. <quotes>!?
As Stefanone, Lackaff, and Rosen put it “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."
This points to the conclusion that, perhaps, "fame is just a computermounted (sic) camera away". Just like many celebrities periodically commit to broadcast their personal thoughts and feelings to an audience of fans (Twitter), regular internet users gradually started not only to interact digitally with their idols, but also to publish their stories and confessions on blogs, videoblogs, publicly available on the web.
Thanks to the recent technological advancements, furthermore, the tools and techniques employed by celebrities (or their PR staff) to edit their mediated image - such as photo editing, “carefully coordinated social interactions, strategic se- lection, and entourage maintenance” are available to the everyday SNS user, and mediate everyday personal interactions. (Stefanone,...)
"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."
"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."
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Confessions
After examining the way Celebrity Culture silently promoted the idea of self-disclosure, and people’s striving desire to become celebrities themselves, by taking part in Tv Shows, and with the use of SNS, I would like to discuss the topic of confessions. Confession is here intended as the ritual of disclosing one’s private thoughts to the public, in the form of a blog, videoblog, or other storytelling exhibitionistic activity.
Confessions always fascinated me, for they are an uttermost unique form of willing submission to surveillance. They are the apex of meekness (one of the seven virtues in the christian tradition): the one who confesses reveals details about his life even before the invasion of privacy.
"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."
"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."
<confession = self help>
"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."
-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)
Once the question “why do we share?” is answered, then perhaps it is interesting to inquire “why do we share so much?”
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Oversharing: privacy and a new notion of public space
"The sanctity of privacy has been eroded by the increasing intrusion of the technology of surveillance" [Susan J.Ducker & Gary Gumpert]
Again, the discourse on privacy and sharing is linked to these two complementary perspectives: voyeurism(1) and exhibitionism(2). The changing attitude towards privacy fosters voyeurism: the more we accept the fact that our lives, interest and monetary transactions are monitored and recorded, the more comfortable we feel to surrender the associated data willingly (2). At the same time, as our idea of private information evolves, we also are more predisposed towards watching others (1). “If I can be watched, in other words, then we certainly should be able to do some watching of our own."
"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."
Reality TV and Tell-all Tv shows taught us that "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" This is just a little example of how no boundaries exist in the respect of private grieveng (...)
"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." the promise of the real in reality TV: that surveillance provides a certain guarantee of authenticity, and that this authenticity becomes a process of self-expression, self-realization, and self-validation.
“Furthermore, in a teeming society wherein one’s actions often go unnoticed by others, the implication is that the reality of those actions can be validated if they are recorded and broadcast—they become more real to oneself to the extent that they become real for others.”
“a combination of self-discovery and self-promotion, and, at times, self-discovery through self-promotion. Another way to describe this combination is as willing self-promotion, or what Reginald Whitaker has described as voluntary submission to the “participatory panopticon.”65”
“Programs like The Real World reinforce that marketing strategy by equating self-disclosure with freedom and authenticity.”
It [being on Road Rules] validates what you did and why you were there.”41
look at the cast not only as experimental subjects, but as people with whom to identify.
“Everyone should have an audience”— presumably to help them learn about themselves and to keep them honest.52
"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."
"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."
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Reaching out: a new concept of Community
From the perspective of contemporary society, we could think of the Traditional society as “the locus of nonalienated handicraft production and of a rich and participatory community life” - those characteristics of modern life were easily eroded by the advent of of modern, and then mass society. [andrejevic]
Naturally, one of the recurring themes of modernity is the nostalgia of certain mores maiorum: community, tradition, “an existence steeped in the deep meaning of shared ritual”, the loss of whose Max Weber describes as “disenchantment” of the world. [ibid].
With the advent of the digital revolution comes a promise: “we may finally be reaching the point at which dramatic technological advances make it possible to recapture the era of community, of participation, of fulfilling work and individualized goods that characterized the image of traditional society figured in modernity’s backward gaze”.
On the side of these theories, reality TV formats such as Big Brother and Survivor, by portraying the (often boring) rythm “one of the recurring themes of reality TV formats that document the ongoing rhythm of the daily lives of their cast members is that of a return to premodem or traditional community.”
As we have observed in the earlier chapter, describing Reality TV shows such as Big Brother and Survivor,
“one of the distinctive characteristics of modernity is the loss of the forms of mutual monitoring associated with traditional community and the emergence of the distinctive anonymity of urban life. The demise of traditional society is associated with the replacement of a more generalized form of mutual surveillance by segmented and hierarchical structures of monitoring.”
“the promise to surpass the hierarchy of mass society (and its “top-down” model of monitoring) is accompanied by the resuscitation of forms of lateral surveillance and mutual monitoring associated with life in traditional, premodem communities.”
“the first half of the twentieth century, which encompassed the dramatic productivity increases of industrial society, strategies for the rationalization of both mass production and mass consumption, and the rise of advertising-supported mass media with a nationwide reach.”
“the rationalization of the production process and the associated increase in the division between mental and material labor that comes to characterize the way of life associated with mass society.”
“The current and ongoing creation of a mass-customized society is predicated not just on the continual retraining of both workers and consumers in the use of interactive technologies, but upon their willing entrance into what this book calls the “digital enclosure” wherein they participate in the work of being watched.”
“The revolutionary promise of the digital future, on this account, is to free us from the rigid spatial and temporal boundaries associated with the rationalization of modem society : the demarcation of the work day and of spaces of leisure, domesticity, consumption, and production.”
“The promise is one of flexibility and convenience for workers and consumers alike.”
“The purported benefit of “flexibility” is that of individuation: the ability of workers to customize their working conditions according to their personal preferences and to overcome the cookie-cutter conformity of mass society.”
“At the same time, however, the promise of flexibility hearkens back to the customized forms of production and consumption associated with pre-modem life, and thus caters to pre-mass-society nostalgia.”
“dedifferentiation of work and daily life enacted by reality TV itself, which transforms the rhythms of daily life into a value-generating activity by virtue of the fact that they can be monitored.”
“The constellation of mass society provides the background against which to consider not just the dedifferentiation of work and leisure associated with interactive forms of consumption but also the dedifferentiation of work and daily life enacted by reality TV itself, which transforms the rhythms of daily life into a value-generating activity by virtue of the fact that they can be monitored.”
“movement—the separation between spaces of work, domesticity, and leisure (at least for paid laborers)—laid the foundations for the boundaries that came to characterize the division of labor and leisure as well as the deployment of surveillance in the workplace.”
“Associated with these dramatic transformations, according to the critics of modernity, was the loss of traditional culture bearings: the emergence of a sense of anomie associated with the loss of a stable and cyclical cultural life.”
“Industrialization eventually required workers to enter not just into a labor contract but also into a distinct physical space operated and controlled by its owners, separated out from sites of domesticity and leisure.”
“At the same time, the separation of the worker from the routines of agrarian life combined with the emergence of urban capitalism undermined traditional social relations,”
“The rise of industrial capitalism meant the disruption of the pace, space, and culture of traditional society.”
“it is the thrill of undermining this centralized control that is deployed by the promoters of reality TV who hype the producers’ ostensible “loss” of control over an unscripted and unrehearsed cast as an authentic challenge to the centralized and hierarchical production processes associated with mass society and mass culture.”
“The promise offered by the digital revolution is to renature work and empower workers by overcoming the constitutive divisions of the modem workplace.”
The role that was previously of the physical community - the one to watch over one’s life - now belongs to the Online Community. Keeping our virtual peers up to date with our everyday actions gives a sense of security: there’s somebody watching out for us, if something was to happen they’d notice. The most shocking aspect of the oversharing of personal information is that it happens -most of the time- willingly.
Participatory Surveillance. very natural and human need Perform or Else Mcenzie Mark Andrejevic- reconfiguring Foucault’s version of Panopticon
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the Eternal Praise of User Generated Content: Why is it so important for the capitalist society that user keep sharing?
“self-disclosure of even the most mundane variety is increasingly economically valuable in a mass-customized economy.”
“consumers are compensated for their loss of control over the production process by the compensatory promise of control and fulfillment via consumption; second, it facilitates the forms of customization and niche marketing associated with the emerging online economy.38”
“Dedifferentiation tends to work only in one direction; it does not make work more like “free time” but, rather, tends to commodify free time by transforming it into time that can be monitored, recorded, repackaged, and sold.”
“Monitoring the digital enclosure is relatively inexpensive because of the interactive capability of the Internet, which allows consumers to participate in the production process and thereby to perform valuable work for producers.”
“In some cases, submission to surveillance becomes a condition for obtaining a service that is only available online.”
“The commodification of news, in short, played a role in its packaging as mass market entertainment: “The search for ‘vivid, bright, and pyrotechnic stories’ led to coverage of disasters, murder, suicide, love triangles, elopements, gossip, and any truly odd story.”47”
“It becomes another symptom of the transition from traditional participatory forms of production to modem, rationalized ones.”
“Interactivity is positioned as the resuscitation of participation: the elimination of the differentiation between reader and writer, viewer and producer.”
“A newspaper that allows its readers to read only about the issues that interest them does not necessarily provide a broader or different range of topics, views, and news than a mass-produced one. Nor does it promote the ability to “talk back” in any more meaningful way than by providing a customized set of preferences. What such a paper does do, however, is help acclimatize readers to a world in which submission to detailed monitoring is the flip side of customization.”
“customization points in the direction not only of allowing the consumer to personalize entertainment (or news) but also of making the consumer the star:”
“The promise of customization and the promise of reality TV overlap insofar as they offer to make the viewer the star, via interactive technology.”
“New media technologies are a central component of mass customization in several ways: they make possible the convergence that dedifferentiates the spheres of consumption, production, and leisure; they facilitate the interactivity that simultaneously redif-ferentiates products and services; and, finally, they enable the surveillance that commodifies the labor of production.”
“Habituating consumers to this kind of surveillance-based customization means overcoming the historical association of surveillance with totalitarian forms of oppression and exploitation. It requires, in short, the repositioning of surveillance as a form of consumer convenience and a means of “adding value” to a media product.”
“Interactivity ... will destroy the elite divide between those who can create and those who can’t. —Peter Gabriel, Time, 1995”
“the deployment of interactive media both enacts and enables mass customization. If mass society was associated with a way of life based on concentrated surveillance in the workplace and the segmentation of the working day, flexible capitalism is associated with the generalization of surveillance and the dedifferentiation of the boundaries between production and consumption.”
“The connection to the real is perhaps the central contribution to the equation of democracy with the new “interactivity” observable in the current pop cultural obsession with reality-based programming, from webcams, to amateur pom, to reality TV, and even car chases.67”
“As culture is commodified and its production rationalized, responsibility for production is monopolized. The participation of the public is reduced to that of consumer/spectator. The hope offered by the advent of the network society is that the converse might be true: that the return of public participation via interactivity might revitalize not only politics and production but also culture—that the interactive aesthetic is a more democratic one than either of those provided by mass society: high culture and the culture industry. Reality TV partakes of the appeal of the interactive aesthetic by taking it literally in order to challenge the abstracted relations of cultural production and reception with the promise of the return of the real.”
“interactivity allows access to a reality that one-way, centralized media could stage only as spectacle.”
“digital culture is portrayed as a means of surpassing the separation between the celebrity artist and the anonymous mass audience.”
“The promise that interactivity (the labor of being watched) represents a more authentic, hence fulfilling, form of participation seems to be predicated on the fact that it takes place outside of the traditional work space and the social relations that characterize it.”
“The search for cheap programming is certainly one of the reasons for the proliferation of the reality format, but it is also worth considering how such a format fits into the logic of mass customization.”
“The attempt to combine one-way television programming with the interactivity (and surveillance) offered by the Internet serves as a kind of transitional stage—TV with interactive training wheels—for mass customization.”
“The crucial question is, Who benefits from dedifferentation process? The business literature argues for a win/win scenario in which the consumer gains added convenience, and the producer remains “at the controls” of an economy cranking up the production cycle to a more frenetic pace.”
“It is obvious that in the case of a site like VoyeurDorm or in the Big Brother house being watched is a form of work. After all, those who agree to turn their private lives into a mediated spectacle are being paid for it.”
“The purpose of pointing out the parallel is to suggest that the interpretation of the act of being watched as a form of work, or value-generating labor, offers a much-needed alternative to the terms of the contemporary critique of online surveillance, which tends to pit convenience against personal privacy.”
“Reality shows like Big Brother and The Real World, which, like webcam sites, are predicated on comprehensive surveillance, highlight this process of dedifferentiation by taking as their production site a “real” home in which the cast members are living their lives.”
“these cast members are working while going about their domestic lives, cooking, cleaning the bathrooms, relaxing in the living room, and so on.”
“At the same time, from a marketing perspective, we will be able to generate value while going about the routines of our daily lives, sending signals about our consumption habits with every TV show we watch, every carton of milk we buy, every website that catches our attention. It’s not just that we’ll be able to work from home, in other words, but that domestic activities that didn’t used to generate value can be captured, recorded, and commodified, thanks to the extended reach of the monitoring gaze facilitated by the digital enclosure. As work becomes more integrated into our domestic lives, domesticity becomes increasingly productive.”
“First, the characters are not professional actors, and, second, the show’s action is unscripted.”
“they are based not on the documentation of exceptional moments but on the surveillance of the rhythm of day-to-day life.”
fantasy of democracy
"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 illusion of democracy>
“the fact that cast members are drawn from the viewing public, and not from the specialized ranks of professional actors. This fact has its practical appeal to producers, insofar as it helps make reality programming cheaper than conventional dramas and sitcoms. Furthermore, it adds to the fantasy appeal of such shows by democratizing it. As Murray puts it, “I think the audience that watches the show thinks that they have an opportunity to be on it.”20”
“Part of the claim to “reality” of a show like The Real World” then, relies on the explicit assertion that the control of specialists over the program has given way to that of the “real” people it documents—nonspecialists, just like members of the audience”
“viewers/producers provide the content that adds value to the program/product that is then repackaged and sold back to them.”
“reality TV shows serve as the perfect metaphor for the online economy: they directly exploit the work of being watched as a source of cheap labor. Furthermore they demonstrate just how gratifying being watched all the time can be. Pervasive surveillance is presented as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world— a way not just to express oneself but an entrée into the world of wealth and celebrity.”
“If Big Brother famously represented the threat of totalitarian government intrusion, corporations can distance themselves by making an appeal to the fact that they’re interested in providing goods and services, not in securing totalitarian domination. Furthermore, they can argue that the information they gather remains, in the legal sense, private. Otherwise, of course, they could not exploit its economic value.”
“Perhaps the secret to making surveillance more acceptable is not to lessen its extent but, on the contrary, to universalize it—or, to borrow a metaphor from the folks at MIT’s Media Lab, to make it as invisible and ubiquitous as oxygen (with the help of ever more sophisticated and unobtrusive monitoring technology).”
“The paradox of a surveillance-based economy is that it pretends to individuals that they count—that they are worthy of individual attention—even though all it really wants to do is count them—to plug their vital statistics into a marketing algorithm.”
“Too often, the critique of the mass media is accompanied by an uncritical celebration of the inherently progressive virtues of participation. This celebration manifests itself in the equation of participation with democratization.”