This is really part 2 of the previous entry, the retreat into visual culture. However, what the appearance of the category “Reality TV” (henceforth RTV) does is fulfil the desire of people to see people like themselves represented onscreen, although this results in a circularity.
RTV, according to historical lore, began with Peter Robinson’s series, Family, in the 1970s. I’m old enough to remember it, and to remember that it was fascinating (for a fictional ‘take’ on RTV, watch Roddy Doyle’s series, Family or Kurosawa’s film, Rashmon). It established the format that has become standard: group interaction; individual addresses to camera; contrast of spectator view with group view with individual view. RTV came “into its own” after the “financial crash” of 2008, when TV advertising collapsed. It’s cheap to make, it apparently shows “real people” in “real situations”…and there are all kinds of ‘variants’, from Big Brother, through Raised by the Village, to Britain’s Got Talent to Love Island. As a resource for TV producers, the possibilities seem endless, as do the number of people who clamour to be ‘contestants’. The reward of RTV isn’t so much the winning or the cash prize, it’s the celebrity. RTV has always been a cross-platform entity: TV; online; print media. In its earlier days, RTV programmes would even make the TV news.
The rise of RTV is, of course, connected to the explosion of TV channels AND social media (SM). Many new channels relied on RTV programming, while SM began the process of presenting us with clips that were “more real” than RTV.
RTV, then, lays the groundwork for SM. RTV is the dream of celebrity made flesh (N.B. I’m deliberately using ‘celebrity’ rather than ‘fame’. It seems to me that someone is famous for being able to do something – write, film, play sport – whereas celebrity is about being known and making yourself known.), yet opportunities are limited. SM offers everyone the potential of becoming a celebrity. Again, on RTV, spectators can: watch and hear people saying ‘outrageous’ things; encounter racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic sentiment; observe ridiculous stunts; see people make fools of themselves. The spectator is instantly involved in a conspiracy of superiority with the producers of RTV, based on the notion that “I would never do/say/behave like that.” What consistent exposure to RTV establishes is taking pleasure in outrage. Being outraged is something spectators enjoy. RTV also fosters celebrity as an aspect of ideology: money, and money alone, equals success because money is ‘freedom’, the ability to “be who you are”.
An aside: economic success has displaced all other forms as the guarantor of ‘happiness’; everything else has been adjudicated as ‘woke’ – we are, whether we realise it or not, involved in a perpetual culture war in which wealth and greed are the only metrics of worth and success. After all, the USA is currently experiencing rule by RTV; a game show host was elected as president, who then proceeded to appoint other TV ‘personalities’ as his ‘cabinet’, use the presidency to accumulate personal wealth, and introduce (reintroduce?) a culture of performative cruelty based on far-right ideas of gender and race. Make America the 1940s again.
SM took up the parameters of RTV but with two vital differences; (i) it enables those who hold repugnant views to express these anonymously, therefore, without fear of censure and (ii), it enables those who hold such views to find each other, which reinforces and ‘normalises’ these, and to attack those whose views differ from their own. SM rather than being a “spectator sport” is participatory, the idea of celebrity is within the grasp of anyone. SM fulfils the capitalist dream: each user becomes their own product; each user is subjected to behaving in particular ways (thus, is not actually a ‘user’ but someone who is ‘subjected’); uniform individuality has become ‘normal’; consumerism becomes the only legitimate form of Being, and the only way of legitimising one’s Being; authenticity is contingent on the approval of others. SM creates a uniform world and uniform (re)actions, whilst perpetuating the myth of individuality.
As the visual image became the preferred (dictated?) form of expression on SM, literate culture slipped away. We can speculate that this is because the visual is seen as being more immediate, more instantaneously understandable than the literate. This is, of course, what we might call a “category error”, or a series of category errors. As I said in a previous entry, people mistakenly identify the density of the visual image for what could be called “honest simplicity”: they mistake what they see for perception because they are unaware of the elements that give the visual image meaning(s). Understanding appears to be instant because the clip resembles material reality, in the same way that a film resembles material reality (but is not). One can say that this is a similar situation to those who mistake films for representations of material reality instead of re-presentations of a reality, a mediated reality.
In the discussions I’ve had over the years regarding censorship and film, I have always argued that only those who have mental health issues mistake film-reality for material reality. However, to maintain this position in regard to SM seems to imply that, to be consistent, I would have to argue for a kind of collective mental health issue caused by (continued) exposure to SM.
However, is this actually the case? Young people, and this is the “target group” both for SM and for governments who blame SM for a host of ‘problems’, therefore, want to prohibit the young from seeing ‘it’, as has happened in the past with theatre, novels, film, TV and games. Of course, Plato advocated banning Art of any kind from his ideal republic. What is happening here is the usual establishment practice of blaming particulars for the failure of the general. Why hold capitalism responsible for its failure when you can blame SM? Rather than seeing the uses to which SM has been put as symptomatic of how capitalism distorts and corrupts every ‘thing’ (and, under capitalism, the human person is also a ‘thing’, an object that falls victim to greed and profit…even if the human person is a ‘thing’ of a special kind), to maintain the ‘system’, the argument becomes one of technological determinism, which facilitates the blaming of the thing-in-itself, rather than the system which contains the thing.
One can argue that we need to ‘equip’ each human person with the ‘skills’ that they need to dismantle the visual image and, thus, the ways in which the visual image is used. This would enable users to identify the ways in which they are ‘subjected’ by the visual image, therefore, SM, therefore, capitalism; the ideological links between the apparently ‘separate’ elements would necessarily be established and revealed.
This is something that film theory has been aware of, and subjected to analysis, for years. All we need to is cite Arnheim, Mulvey or Deleuze, to name but three, and their analyses of “film reality”. Even at a very basic level, we could teach people to examine the number of assumptions that the visual image contains, as we do in regard to the first five minutes of a mainstream film: inequality as ‘natural’; competition as ‘natural’; power dictating ‘good’ and ‘bad’; heteronormality and, ultimately, capitalism as ‘natural’. This is before we get to the Aristotelian template for narrative. To put it bluntly, give the spectator a figure with whom they can identify (noting that that ‘figure’ can often be the camera, therefore, an unseen ‘figure’), or rather align – when we identify with a character, we do so consciously; when we align with a character, the process is unconscious, caused by the combination of elements which go to make up the narrative. Following from this, the spectator then imports these meanings and, therefore, an understanding of, a perspective on, the material reality in which they live. The similarity of these images, and their constant repetition, legitimise a way of seeing material reality – the world around us, social systems and other human persons – that is distorted…but this distortion is concealed behind a sham ‘naturalness’, behind the entirely constructed concept of “common sense”.
As users lack the ‘skills’ to apply analysis to SM, SM is taken as being indicative of the ways in which one should behave, and the ‘opinions’ one should hold. This is, again, a return to Aristotle and his argument that the human person is, first and foremost, an imitative creature.
SM in its “capitalist manifestation” is simply another element that is being represented, as TV was, as an instance of technological determinism, rather than the symptom of system failure.
Perhaps the ultimate questions are “What good has capitalism produced?” and “How has capitalism benefited humanity?”