User:Marlon/realitytv

Better Living Through Reality TV

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.