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Reality TV-Critique Cultural Product

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Reality TV - unique cultural product

In the attempt to fully historicize Reality TV we should always have in mind the format, the social dimensions in which it was created, and its effects. Decades ago it would have been hard to imagine that we would be thinking that our attitudes for defining reality would be mediated by a media format. The complex field of defining reality through the scope of contemporary media is inherently connected to the cultural code of the media imperialism. In our attempts to deconstruct reality through the prism of television erudition we stand upon the challenge to ask what is real today and what will not be real tomorrow?
Baudrilard would answer this question in different terms suggesting that reality merely …show more content…
In the chapter “Raymond Williams and the Structure of Feeling on Reality TV” Beast maps two dynamics that William’s critical methods (sociology of culture) disclose when articulated to the phenomenon of Reality TV.
According to Best’s study the first dynamics relates to people’s submission to surveillance in the contemporary consumer societies while the second dynamic is connected to the social discourse in which the Reality TV participates as promoter of democratic participation and interactivity.
“Reality TV both reflects and aids in facilitating a collective and yet individually expressed drive to make oneself publicly visible, to make oneself seen and heard by an audience of spectators, to have one‟s fifteen minutes of fame, to simulate the public visibility of celebrity. This same dynamic also takes the form of a generalized lack of resistance to (or internalized rationalization of, and even an enthusiastic embrace of) comprehensive surveillance.” (Best …show more content…
Going beyond the borders of the traditional TV formats it not only provides and creates social space for the ordinary people to be present, but assures wider public participation by voting and online communication enabled by the new technologies. This feature exclusively grants the audiences to be active contributors, and not only passive viewers. .In his article Best illustrates Williams’claim that ‘ as a culture becomes richer and more complex..the social distance of many practices becomes much greater, and there is virtually inevitable if always complex set of divisions between participants and spectators in the various arts”(Williams 1981, 91) when he argues that the two dynamics of Reality TV situated in the wider social and historical processes produce are concerned with “the problem of acceses”

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