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Fast media, slow media: Losing Time With the Kardashians
Arthur Asseraf
Critical Quarterly, 2018
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Guilty Pleasures and Cultural Legitimation: Exploring High-Status Reality TV in the Postnetwork Era
Michael L Wayne
Journal of Popular Culture, 2015
The proliferation of original programming on cable networks and the emergence of digital technologies has led some observers to claim that contemporary American television is in the midst of its third golden age (the first two are associated with the 1950s and 1980s, respectively). While critics praise the literary qualities of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, reality TV “has inherited the rotten reputation that once attached to the medium itself” as shows like MTV’s Jersey Shore “still provide a fat target for anyone seeking symptoms or causes of American idiocy” (Sanneh). In fact, reality shows are largely omitted from discussions addressing television’s rising cultural status. Nevertheless, in the context of the criticism directed at reality TV as a genre, one basic cable network is frequently celebrated for producing television’s best reality shows. According to the trade publication Advertising Age, A&E is “the premiere destination for unscripted programs that are authentic and relatable.” In describing the network, a New York Times critic writes, “From Intervention and The First 48 to Beyond Scared Straight and Heavy, these are well made, compulsively watchable series” (Hale). By highlighting the ways in which these programs rely upon problematic hierarchies that equate classed notions of reflexivity with moral worth, this article argues that the relative legitimacy of Intervention and Beyond Scared Straight depends on these shows’ ability to extract middle-class-appropriate behavior from socially marginal participants.
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You Did(n't) Build That: Audience Reception of a Reality Television Star's Transformation from a Real Housewife to a Real Brand
Kavita Nayar-Jablonka
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Scholars do Bravo Too: Reality Television, Public History, and the Historians on Housewives Podcast
Jessica Millward, Max Speare
Journal of Women's History, 2020
Our podcast brings together scholars from across the academy to use the pop cultural phenomenon of The Real Housewives reality television show as a vehicle to explore questions about United States and world history and interdisciplinary methods of research. Historians on Housewives and guests on the podcast interrogate characters and episode story arcs to contextualize academic history for a public audience using BravoTV's vast catalogue, including non-Housewives programming, as an archive. Launched in August of 2019, the first season tackled a broad spectrum of subjects, including slavery; segregation; the politics of fashion and identity formation; wealth accumulation and branding; publishing; colonialism; immigration; historical memory; oral history; genocide; adolescence; feminism; motherhood; fertility; divorce; and domestic violence.1
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The Politics of Reality TV
Susan Murray
Media & Society, 6th edition , 2019
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"'Trust the Process': Reality TV, Cable News, and the Politics of Reassurance"
Sarah Kessler
Television & New Media, 2024
This essay examines "process" discourse and the politics of reassurance across the prototypically American media domains of reality TV and cable news. Using The Bachelorette's 2020 season and CNN's concurrent coverage of 2020s famously disputed presidential election as case studies, it argues that both broadcasts' copious references to the soundness of the "processes" they purport to depict both naturalize and stabilize the tenuous notions of heterosexuality and democracy on which they rest. The two programs' exemplary televisual "process" discourse reassures even cynical viewers that, though much of the pleasure US audience-members take in their broadcasts derives from the spectacle (or threat) of dysfunctionality, we can ultimately rely on the functionality of the systems that govern our lives. Not least, it courts the perception that television is the true arbiter of "the process," and thus that TV itself deserves Americans' trust-a vitally important impression to maintain during a global pandemic.
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Towards a History of Media Conjuncture: The Daily Show, Audience and the "Revolution"
Boris Ruzic
In this paper I am proposing the relinquishing of the notion of "breaking the media value chain" in favor of the concept of "media conjuncture" as used by Antonio Gramsci and subsequently Stuart Hall. By his account, "a conjuncture is a period in which the contradictions and problems and antagonisms, which are always present in different domains in a society, begin to come together. They begin to accumulate, they begin to fuse, to overlap with one another" (2013). By that account, I propose to review the concept of "revolution" in the media chain as constitutive and productive for media conjuncture by appropriating its original Latin meaning of "circling" or "returning", and not of relinquishing or breaking. I will analyze a couple of significant media occurrences that portray possible directions for new media strategies (e.g. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart). In that light, my main goal is to propose that the new media perspective and the appropriation of technology (internet) have changed the nature of the dissemination of information. New media provides a new perspective in which the user is almost always the arbiter of informational usefulness. The functioning of today's media institutions as "objective" and universal becomes dead weight as the idea of information as semantically ambiguous becomes the dominant model of thought. By that account, my analysis will try to show the possible trajectory of new media thinking towards the notion of "information with a face". The "crisis of media", therefore, could be averted by abandoning the idea of unidirectional dissemination of information from the "producers" to their receivers in favor of "nomadic hierarchy" by which the information sphere is always intersubjective (through internet-decentralized participation). Therefore, the question of which contents are user willing to pay in the age of social networks should be remade into that of what specific content is media willing to disseminate in the age of informational ubiquitousness. Deep structural changes in the mediasphere are only reaffirming the age old questions of power relations between culture, economy and information, and their dialectic can be properly viewed only through systemic analysis of their complex historicities. Media institutions must adapt to these new complexities of conjuncture, as their power of controlling the market and the information has decreased substantially proves to be a revolutionary potential in the era of information.
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Multiracialism on The Real World and the Reconfiguration of Politics in MTV's Brand During the 2000s
Sula Sidnell-Greene
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Idolizing and Monetizing the Public: The Production of Celebrities and Fans, Representatives and Citizens in Reality TV
Yngvar Kjus
International Journal of Communication, 2009
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TELLING IT ALL: A GENRE-BASED APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE AMERICAN TABLOID TALKSHOW
Carmen Gregori-Signes
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