Big Brother: Reconfiguring the `active' audience of cultural studies?
Abstract
The emergence of a relatively new genre, `reality television', has helped to break down the division between text and audience in significant ways, and this presents us with interesting questions for cultural studies. In this article we consider one such text, the enormously successful `reality gameshow' Big Brother, and explore the extent to which it challenges or helps to reconfigure current conceptualizations of the audience and the `television text'. We outline some of the issues involved in analyzing Big Brother and situate the program within the context of the complex history of cultural studies' attempts to `think the audience' for popular media.
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1.
1. See Geraghty and Lusted (1998) for an overview of research methods in audience studies.
2.
2. A second series of Big Brother appeared on British television in the late spring of 2001, the publicity for which built on and amplified the knowledge about the show that had already circulated with the first run the previous year.
3.
3. It thus extended the concept of reality-based shows such as The Real World, which had been broadcast on MTV since the mid-1980s, and which also featured real people sharing a house, by incorporating a gameshow format and inviting viewer participation.
4.
4. This `return to basics' at the level of technology has also influenced recent film-making approaches which emulate or reference the tradition of the documentary and offer themselves as relatively unmediated texts. See Conrich and Tincknell (2000) for a discussion of this.
5.
5. See Rath (1989) for an interesting discussion of `liveness' in television as `pure' and `impure' forms of broadcasting.
References
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Article first published: May 2002
Issue published: May 2002
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This article was published in European Journal of Cultural Studies.
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