Reality TV Is About Surveillance

Mark Andrejevic

Mark Andrejevic is the deputy director of the Center for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and the author of "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched."

Updated October 21, 2012, 7:01 PM

Not long after the Sept. 11 attacks I received a call from a reporter about, oddly enough, reality TV. He wanted to know whether we had been cured of our fascination with reality shows by a tragic dose of “real” reality. His story was part of the “time to get serious” response to the attacks: for a fleeting moment we were assured that the media would turn its attention to important and meaningful issues.

The reality TV promise parallels the commercial message of the online economy: surveillance is good for you, unless you have something to hide.

The reporter got it wrong – and not just because he was assuming reality TV provided cheap compensation for an imagined dearth of reality. Another mistake he made was thinking about reality TV as cultural critics and pundits often do: just one more trend, like medical dramas or police whodunnits.

Reality TV is something more: an omnivorous meta-genre that scavenges its way across the cultural landscape unearthing attention-grabbing nuggets from a vastly broader range of social life than has hitherto appeared on commercial TV. Not everyone will get his 15 minutes, but you never know who might be up next. The result is that we are provided with a much more diverse (though hardly representative) image of ourselves as a society -- even if this image is admittedly shaped by caricature and contrivance.

The reason reality TV is not going away any time soon is that its production fits neatly with the logic of the emerging surveillance economy. It provides relatively cheap and flexible programming for a massively multichannel era by inviting cast members to submit to monitoring as a form of participation, self-expression and even therapy. In this respect the reality TV promise parallels the commercial message of the online economy: since surveillance is good for you, only those with something to hide shun it.

It also caters to and epitomizes an increasingly reflexive attitude toward the contrivance of mediated representation: everyone knows reality TV isn’t real, and yet the hope remains that it might capture an elusive moment of authenticity, that it has something to tell us about ourselves as a society, and that pervasive (or covert) monitoring, might be one way to get at it a moment of truth. So is reality TV lowering the bar or is it as worthwhile as anything that’s been on TV?

Yes -- on both counts.

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Topics: Culture, entertainment, television

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