Reality Television: Merging the Global and the Local

308 Pages·2011·8.302 MB·English

by  Amir Hetsroni

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS – TECHNOLOGIES, POLICIES AND CHALLENGES

R T – M
EALITY ELEVISION ERGING THE
G L
LOBAL AND THE OCAL

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MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS – TECHNOLOGIES,
POLICIES AND CHALLENGES

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MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS – TECHNOLOGIES, POLICIES AND CHALLENGES

R T – M
EALITY ELEVISION ERGING THE
G L
LOBAL AND THE OCAL

AMIR HETSRONI
EDITOR

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Reality television : merging the global and the local / editor: Amir
Hetsroni.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61324-675-7 (eBook)
1. Reality television programs--Social aspects. 2. Reality television
programs--Political aspects. I. Hetsroni, Amir.
PN1992.8.R43R43 2010
791.45'6--dc22
2010016721

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York
CONTENTS

Preface vii
Introduction 1
Section I: North America 5
Chapter 1 Do You Know who your Friends are?
An Analysis of Voting Patterns and Alliances on the
Reality Television Show Survivor 7
Erich M. Hayes and Norah E. Dunbar
Chapter 2 Reality Television and Computer-Mediated Identity:
Offline Exposure and Online Behavior 25
Michael A. Stefanone, Derek Lackaff
and Devan Rosen
Section II: Europe 45
Chapter 3 You‘ll See, You‘ll Watch: The Success of
Big Brother in Post-Communist Bulgaria 47
Maria Raicheva-Stover
Chapter 4 Gok Wan and the Magical Wardrobe 65
Gareth Palmer
Chapter 5 Slovene Reality Television: The Commercial
Re-Inscription of the National 79
Zala Volcic and Mark Andrejevic
Chapter 6 Talking about Big Brother: Interpersonal Communication
about a Controversial Television Format 95
Helena Bilandzic and Matthias R. Hastall
Section III: The Middle East 113
Chapter 7 Reality vs. Reality TV: News Coverage in Israeli
Media at the Time of Reality TV 115
Dror Abend-David
vi Contents
Chapter 8 Real Love Has No Boundaries? Dating Reality TV Shows
between Global Format And Local-Cultural Conflicts 123
Motti Neiger
Chapter 9 The Seal of Culture in Format Adaptations:
Singing for a Dream on Turkish Television 137
Sevilay Celenk
Chapter 10 The Praise and the Critique of a Nasty Format:
An Analysis of the Public Debate Over Reality TV in Israel 151
Amir Hetsroni
Section IV: Cross-Cultural Studies 163
Chapter 11 Performing the Nation: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
of Idol Shows in Four Countries 165
Oren Livio
Chapter 12 Mobile Makeovers: Global and Local Lifestyles
and Identities in Reality Formats 189
Tania Lewis
Chapter 13 From Reality TV To Coaching TV: Elements of Theory
and Empirical Findings Towards Understanding the Genre 211
Jürgen Grimm
Chapter 14 Reality Nations: An International Comparison
of the Historical Reality Genre 259
Emily West
About the Contributors 279
Index 283
PREFACE

Reality television has become a worldwide phenomenon which has the capability to
crossover cultural boundaries and appeal to distinctly different markets. Drawing theories
from media studies, economics, cultural studies and social science, this new book reviews
how reality TV has conquered the world and has the potential to remove successful dramatic
genres from the prime-time lineup.
Chapter 1 - There has been a boom in the popularity of reality television programming
among the large U.S. networks because it is a cost-efficient way to produce popular
programming without the need to employ writers to develop scripts or pay actors to portray
fictional characters (Poniewozik, 2009). In reality shows like Survivor, drama is created by
putting interesting people into unique situations so the audience can then imagine themselves
in those situations. Survivor, created by Mark Burnett and currently in its twentieth season,
has become the model for many other reality television shows where contestants are isolated
and are eliminated competitively each week until there is a single winner remaining. Shows
such as The Amazing Race, Big Brother, and even Project Runway or HGTV’s Design Star
have been modeled after the Survivor formula. By studying the behavior of the contestants in
the show, our goal is to examine the reasons for the show‘s success and discuss the impact
that the decisions made by the contestants have on the audience.
Chapter 2 - Life on the screen makes it very easy to present oneself as other than one is in
real life. And although some people think that representing oneself as other than one is always
a deception, many people turn to online life with the intention of playing it in precisely this
way. (Turkle, 1995, p. 228.)
In her now-classic work Life on the Screen, sociologist Sherry Turkle (1995) effectively
captured the radical zeitgeist of the early public internet: absent physical cues in the text-
based medium, individuals were free to construct and deconstruct identity as they saw fit.
Gender, race, and ability only became a component of social exchange to the degree that
individuals chose to introduce it. "We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege
or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,"
optimistically declared another early commentator (Barlow, 1996). Significant amounts of
subsequent research energy have been devoted to exploring how computer mediation affects
personal identity construction and social interaction (e.g. Donath, 1999; Ellison, Heino, and
Gibbs, 2006; Walther, 2007).
Chapter 3 - Until recently, Bulgarians thought of Big Brother as the embodiment of a
totalitarian government capable of subjecting everybody to an uninterrupted surveillance
viii Amir Hetsroni
apparatus. Having survived 45 years of communist control, Bulgarians were all too aware of
George Orwell‘s gripping description of the totalitarian state in his Nineteen-Eighty-Four
novel. Not a lot of people would have heard of the reality show by the same name. The
introduction of Big Brother as the first Bulgarian reality show, however, marked a sharp
transition to a new media reality in this post-communist country. Almost overnight, Big
Brother became a big media event, attracting not only unparalleled attention from audiences,
but dramatically changing the television landscape of the country. According to official data,
2.1 million viewers (62.5 percent of all viewers) were glued to the screen for the first season
finale (Antonova and Kandov, 2005).
Chapter 4 - Lifestyle Television can be profitably analysed by considering the way in
which magical symbolism combine with commercial interests to sell the ideology of
consumerism. In this paper I begin by discussing Lifestyle Television‘s relationship to Reality
Television and trends in consumerism in work very much informed by my reading of Adorno.
I then follow with a detailed analysis of Gok‘s Fashion Fix. In this I draw on the mythical
studies of Joseph Campbell to show how the Individual-as-hero and their mythic Quest to
find the self presents a magical sheen to what is essentially a drive to align the individual with
products more suited to their personality-type. I follow this by analysing the role of the
Supernatural aid or Magical Helper. The gifts of this individual to befriend and help the hero-
questor achieve self realization has to be considered in the light of the advertising that goes in
and around the programme which in turn connects to the distinctly unmagical business of
commerce. I then conclude by considering ‗Entering the Belly of the Whale‘ - the
Transformation – the onstage/catwalk fulfillment which is presented as a self-overcoming and
a re-birth but is also a loud and aggressive celebration of what consumerism can do for the
individual. In short I want to consider how the rational and the irrational are blended together
to create a productive consumer whose self-fulfilment has a fortunate connection with the
world of goods and services.
Chapter 5 - In the fall of 2007 Slovenia found its most popular reality format to date, a
show called simply The Farm, which tapped directly into the country's self-identification with
its rural, agricultural history. The Farm easily outperformed all competitors, including locally
produced familiar global formats like The Bachelor, PopStars, Big Brother, and Who Wants
to be a Millionaire, earning high ratings among the coveted 18-49 demographic, and breaking
ratings records with its finale. On average, the show's 2007 season regularly drew almost half
of the viewers watching TV during its primetime slot (45%) in a county of 2 million people
(POP TV, 2007). This success was even more striking, given the fact that Slovenia is a nation
with relatively high penetration of cable television (57%) and a wide selection of regional and
international channels. In short, The Farm was a national phenomenon and, as we will argue,
a nationalist one, insofar as it tapped into a deep vein of rural nostalgia for Slovene folk
culture, complete with traditional costumes, accordian-centred folk music, and a celebration
of the country's agricultural way of life.
Chapter 6 - At the beginning of the 21st century, episodes of the reality television show
Big Brother were watched by millions of viewers worldwide and became the subject of
countless media and interpersonal debates (Bignell, 2005). Big Brother was ―in many ways a
watershed for our understanding of media audiences‖ (Ross and Nightingale, 2003, p. 3), as it
provoked unprecedented levels of audience ratings and audience involvement. This chapter
explores the relationship between a media spectacle like Big Brother and interpersonal
communications about such events by viewers and non-viewers. We follow Hartley's (1999)
Preface ix
understanding of interpersonal communication as a face-to-face communication from one
individual to another, in which personal characteristics, social roles and social relationships of
the communicating individuals are reflected by form and content of the communication. Our
perspective is not restricted to family communication (e.g., Larson, 1993), but encompasses
all situations and locations in which interpersonal communication about television programs
occurs.
Chapter 7 - On Monday, April 20, 2009, the Israeli press highlighted an important
announcement by the Governor of Israel's National Bank, Professor Stanley Fischer: One or
two major companies might find themselves in bankruptcy by the end of the week (Avriel,
2009). The press was immediately buzzing with the names of possible Israeli companies and
individuals who might be candidates for bankruptcy. However, by the end of the week, the
press was already preoccupied with the hostilities between Fischer and Bank Hapoalim owner
Shari Arison, and the identity of the Israeli mogul to be banished from the circles of economic
powers was never revealed.
Chapter 8 - Globalization has become one of the most debated topics in social science
research since the 1960s (Appadurai, 1990; Ritzer, 1995). During the late 1980s, mainly due
to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the concept began to gain momentum in the scientific
community (Srebreny-Mohammadi et al., 1997), and for over a decade a significant growth
can be observed both in the research literature that refers to the phenomenon and in the
number of researchers whose work deals with it (Guillén, 2001). One of the key questions
regarding Globalization – the process that integrates different societies/cultures into a single
cross-national unit – is whether local/national cultures are able to challenge the process of
Globalization/Americanization (―The McDonaldization of Society‖, Ritzer, 1993) in a
combined dynamics of ―Glocalization‖ and Hybridity (Robertson, 1994; Ritzer and Ryan,
2003; Kraidy, 2002) or they must surrender their local identity in order to become integrated
and compete in the capitalist market.
Chapter 9 - My father never wore a suit. He watches you on television and says ―Ibrahim
Tatlises is wearing such a nice suit.‖ May I ask you, Mr. Ibrahim, to give the suit that you are
wearing to my father? (Peker and Peker, 2007, episode 8).
These words are from a viewer letter sent to the popular Turkish television show Hayalin
Icin Soyle (Singing for a Dream). No one, neither the participants, nor the viewers watching
the program on the television, were expecting these words when the presenter announced that
she would be reading a letter from a viewer. Nevertheless, this unusual request by a 10-year-
old viewer was not so astonishing as it was only one of the many unexpected demands by the
viewers, who wanted their own share of the glamorous world of Turkish television. In other
words, this request was being expressed through such a locality and culturality, that it
rendered ordinary its own strangeness. Ibrahim Tatlises, who is one of the most popular
singers of Turkey, received many requests during this reality show, where he served as a jury
member. In the letter mentioned above, he was being asked to take off what he is wearing and
to give it to someone else. Still, this was not the only interesting expression of culture and
identity, which rendered Singing for a Dream reality television talent competition overly
local. The show, which had been adapted from a foreign format, had even established locality
as an ―excessiveness.‖ At one point, Muazzez Abaci, who has been one of the most famous
singers of Turkey for the last 50 years -though she was not as popular at all times- cheered a
disabled contestant by saying ―kurban olurum sana‖—a traditional Turkish expression, which
means ―I would sacrifice myself for you.‖ Neither was this one of the most interesting