Reality television

Building a Blog Cabin during a Financial Crisis: Circuits of Struggle in the Digital Enclosure

by Robert Gehl

Television and New Media, 2012

In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose... more In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this focus on enclosure tends to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory—namely, that users, under certain circumstances, can appropriate these applications to contest conditions of exploitation. This article offers an analysis of Blog Cabin 2008, a cable home improvement show, in order to explore this tension between autonomy and enclosure. Our findings suggest that producers indeed used the show’s blog to exploit fans’ free labor. However, fans also used the blog to form social bonds, to press demands on the show’s producers, and to make connections between the show’s class politics and the wider financial crisis. A concluding section explores the theoretical and political significance of such unanticipated uses of the show’s blog.

Dancing With the Ordinary: Masculine Celebrity Performance on Australian TV

by Robert Payne

Cooking under pressure: how MasterChef reflects reality

by Tania Lewis

Newspaper article published in The Age, 2 May 2012.

Desire and resistance: Big Brother and the recognition of everyday life

by Liesbet van Zoonen

There grows the neighbourhood’: Green citizenship, creativity and life politics on eco-TV

by Tania Lewis

Published in International Journal of Cultural Studies May 2012 vol. 15 no. 3

‘You’ve put yourselves on a plate’: the labours of selfhood on MasterChef Australia

by Tania Lewis

Book chapter in 'Reality Television and Class', Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood (eds.), Palgrave MacMillan, London, 2011: 104-116.

Mobile Makeovers

by Tania Lewis

Book Chapter in 'Reality Television-Merging the Global and the Local' , 2010, Ed.Amir Hetsroni, Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

He Needs to Face His Fears With These Five Queers!": Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Makeover TV, and the Lifestyle Expert

by Tania Lewis

Changing rooms, biggest losers and backyard blitzes: A history of makeover television in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia

by Tania Lewis

La hibridación de lo real: simulacro y performatividad en la era de la postelerrealidad

by Alberto N. García

"La hibridación de lo real: simulacro y performatividad en la era de la postelerrealidad", Analisi, nº 38, 2009, pp. 237-251.

La televisión contemporánea factual se encuentra inmersa en un período de progresiva hibridación y reestilización... more La televisión contemporánea factual se encuentra inmersa en un período de progresiva hibridación y reestilización lúdica que podemos denominar «postelerrealidad». Continuamente se desarrollan nuevos formatos que buscan mantener el interés de la audiencia. En este sentido, resulta interesante examinar cómo —mientras se escenifica lo real— estos nuevos programas juegan con las nociones del simulacro baudrillardiano y la performatividad, conceptos clave para entender las estrategias narrativas y retóricas que despliegan. A la luz de estos conceptos de raigambre posmoderna, este artículo analizará los nuevos formatos de postelerrealidad aparecidos en la televisión en la era posterior a los éxitos de Gran Hermano, Supervivientes y Operación Triunfo, con la finalidad de definir cómo se distorsionan y reinventan términos como autenticidad, realismo y verdad.

"So You Think You Can Dance Does Dance Studies"

by Kate Elswit

TDR 56.1 (2012), 133-142

Making Democracy Spectacular

by Nick Mahony

Mediating the Publics of Public Participation Experiments

by Nick Mahony

On Drawing Knives and Experience: The Rise of the Ekphrastic Text in Bravo's Top Chef

by Ashley Noel Mack

published in The Politics of Style and the Style of Politics, Barry Brummett, ed., 2011. m

In this essay, the ekphrastic text is put forth as a mechanism that more often than not makes use of stylized rhetoric... more In this essay, the ekphrastic text is put forth as a mechanism that more often than not makes use of stylized rhetoric to move audiences in a particular aesthetics way. It will be shown that such a form has political and cultural implications because often it is through the collapsing of authenticity and simulation that consumers in a stylized culture are called upon to purchase and participate in activities represented in ekphrastic texts. What we believe to be authentic determines what we believe to be real, and the ekphastic text provides us with a tool to understand the role of rhetoric in constituting those symbolic resources.In an attempt to elucidate the helpfulness of this concept, I contend that Bravo Network’s popular reality series Top Chef is an enactment of the ekphrastic text in popular culture. Top Chef is an aesthetic experience in the televisual medium that provokes a simulated, yet authentic feeling of aesthetic experience in the sensory medium of taste. In light of the obvious constraints on a television show attempting to communicate and sell the experience of food—the producers, hosts, judges, and competitors on Top Chef develop a language for transmitting taste and smell to viewers.

Reality game shows y narrativa transmediática. Análisis de las estrategias de expansión transmediática de Operación Triunfo y American Idol

by Merce Oliva

Oliva, M.; Pérez, O. (2011). "Reality game shows y narrativa transmediática. Análisis de las estrategias de expansión transmediática de Operación Triunfo y American Idol". Paper presentado en el III Congreso Internacional Latina de Comunicación Social (La Laguna [Tenerife], 6-9 de diciembre de 2011).

En los últimos años el concepto de narrativa transmediática ha emergido como un objeto de estudio central para la... more En los últimos años el concepto de narrativa transmediática ha emergido como un objeto de estudio central para la comprensión de la nueva narrativa televisiva. Habitualmente este tipo de estudios se han centrado en la ficción, sin embargo géneros híbridos como los reality game shows, que también construyen un relato, han establecido sinergias muy significativas con la web (entre otros medios) para enriquecer el mundo narrativo que ofrecen a los espectadores. Por lo tanto, para entender en toda su extensión el fenómeno de la narrativa transmediática también es necesario analizar las estrategias de expansión de estos programas.
En este contexto, esta comunicación plantea como objetivo analizar la expansión transmediática de dos de los reality game shows más populares a nivel internacional y que han utilizado estas estrategias de forma sustancial: Operación Triunfo y American Idol.
Para abordar este objetivo se ha desarrollado una metodología basada en el análisis textual, que incluye el estudio de las características del programa televisivo (análisis de la estructura y diseño de los espacios, las reglas del juego y la realización audiovisual) y la web (análisis de contenidos, diseño visual, diseño de la interactividad y “usuario modelo” construido).
Los resultados de la investigación permiten definir una serie estrategias de expansión transmediática del programa televisivo hacia la web y otros medios, que tienen que ver fundamentalmente con la profundización en los personajes, su representación como estrellas y la construcción del espectador/usuario modelo como fan

Mining Difference for the Culture Industry: Both Borat and Anthropologists Do It

by Adam Fish

A Question of Taste: Cultural Identity on Chopped

by Jeremy Sarachan

Taste and technical considerations of cooking do and should play a significant part in determining who wins, and... more Taste and technical considerations of cooking do and should play a significant part in determining who wins, and members of all ethnicities have won Chopped. But, on numerous occasions, in order to fulfill the expectations of reality television, narrative (and when appropriate, ethnic narrative) is used to create tension, suggesting a prejudice against ethnic cooking, when food should more effectively function as a common language.

Reality Television, The Hills and the Limits of the Immaterial Labour Thesis

by Alison Hearn

Image Slaves

by Alison Hearn

'John, a 20-year-old Boston native with a great sense of humour': on the spectacularization of the'self'and the incorporation of identity in the age of reality television

by Alison Hearn