the non-celebrity is expected to perform, they are perceived to have no
special agenda to do with some image they are trying to cultivate, which
is the skill of celebrity. Instead, a field of identification is established
where we ‘really get to know them for who they really are’.RReeaalliittyy tteelleevviissiioonn The talk show is an important forerunner of reality TV,
which institutionalizes a cluster of practices by which the symbolic
inequalities between media and ‘ordinary’ culture can be redressed. But
this again is only from the standpoint of guests, who feel they are able to
act as representatives of their ‘ordinary’ colleagues, and for individual
viewers, who might identify a guest as ‘standing in’ for them in some
way. Nevertheless, reality TV provides for forms of reciprocity, again by
metonymous identification, which operate without the need for direct
interaction.
It ought to be pointed out that the enormous popularity of reality
television formats since the mid-1990s coincides with the rise of the
Internet as a medium which, in McLuhanist terms, has reworked the
dominant medium of television. Simply put, reality TV is a genre in which
the audience appearsinterchangeable with the producer. In a media land-
scape where individuals might expect greater visibility by dint of the
possibilities of self-publishing on the Internet, so too this ‘struggle for
visibility’ demands greater audience participation in traditional broadcast
media.
Of course, the appearance of interchangeability is all it is. It is not
possible for the whole of the audience to be so exchanged, only a random
selection of that audience. But if the majority of an audience identify with
persons who are seen to be legitimate representatives, the exchange takes
on a convincing, even exciting, quality. This is because, as James Carey
(1989) suggests:In our time reality is scarce because of access: so few command the machin-
er y for its determination. Some get to speak and some to listen, some to
write and some to read, some to film and some to view ... there is not only
class conflict in communication but status conflict as well. (87–8)What is also illusory is the idea that a reality TV show such as
Endemol Corporation’s thirty-seven-country formula Big Brotheris some-
how ‘raw’ and ‘unscripted’, whereas its narrative is so one-dimensionally
determined by the gaze of the camera, architecture and editing.
Whichever version one turns to – Dutch, Australian, French – the same
kinds of cloistered interactions are developed, along with the same
processes of othering – shaming, heroic adulation, sympathy.
These three elements – camera gaze, architecture and editing – combine
to produce a peculiar effect in television convention, the inauguration of
surveillance as a mediated spectacle (Andrejevic, 2004: 2). A distinct field
of recognition is established in such programming by which audiences,Telecommunity 219Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 219