User:Yoana Buzova/Mark Andrejevic

Chapter Seven

Reality TV and Voyeurism

This chapter of Mark Andrejevic's book analyses Fox's reality show Temptation Island, where four long-term relationship couples are separated and put into circumstances providing fertile ground for unfaithfulness. The main subject of the analysis is the voyeuristic character of the show. Both the audience and the participants are given access to 'surveillance' footage, only the audience is given the ultimate power of seeing everything, playing the role of the pure, objective gaze, as opposed to the separated couple members,who only see 'spicy', deprived of context extracts of what their partner's activities.

The Temptation Island show was denounced as disgusting and appalling but this moral indignation saved as a form of publicity and it had it's time slot highest rating. It proved that community identifies itself not within what is considered normal, but within forms of transgression of normality. This proved, that perversion (the show as an example of such) is always socially constructive.  The audience in the postmodern era is the outlined as a savvy viewer. One that gains ostensible power by being able to 'see' reality in true events with real people. It is a paradoxical form of impotent power of the voyeur, who participates by watching. This form of impotent control drives him to the desire to "make oneself seen". The 'postmodern' attitude is a complacent knowledge that derives satisfaction from the knowledge of it's own impotence. Within the reality tv environment and outside of it, the savvy subjects derive pleasure from the fact they are not fooled and know how bad things are and how futile it is to see things otherwise. In the text this is expanded into politics and the naturalization of manipulation.  That is so because of the perversion that simply informing the public serves to ostensibly empower it.  Savviness introduces capitalist culture by incorporating its self-critique into its self-propagation.

We submit surveillance and the idea to make ourselves seen, that means being real. The text sexpands this idea within the context of surveillance-based economy that broadcasts the idea of “making oneself seen” as a form of individuation and self-authentication.

Temptation Island is an example how the viewer gets used to watching and desires to be watched as a form of perverse self-expression.