research report background - s3-eu-west · pdf filefor giddens (1991) and beck (1992) ......

Research Report

Background This project set out to see if the ethical scenarios offered by ‘reality’ television influenced the formation of identities. ‘Reality’ television is regularly spoken of as ‘trash’ television, locating participants and viewers at the bottom of a hierarchy of taste classification 1, and representing a crisis in civic public culture. Using ‘reality’ television as a barometer of current moral value, taste and authority, we explored how television attaches value to practices and people. Our motivation was to interrogate contemporary theories that argue individualisation has led to the demise of class and the rise of the reflexive self. For Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) the project of the reflexive self is non-exclusionary. Yet previous research has suggested that they may be describing the re-making rather than the decline of class (Adkins 2002; Skeggs 2004). Against the putative demise of class, scholars have charted the increased symbolic denigration of the working-class in law (Garland 2001), political rhetoric (Haylett 2001) and popular culture (Lawler 2002; Mount 2004; Skeggs 2005), while others have pointed to an increase in misanthropy more generally (Thrift 2008). In light of these conflicting tendencies our project aimed to ‘test’ the demise of class hypothesis by studying ‘reality’ programmes that incited self-transformation and reflexivity.

Taylor (1989) and Strathern (1992) suggest we are in a period of 'compulsory individuality' where the terms of moral legitimacy have shifted from the traditional sources of authority (religion, the patriarchal family and the state) to the ability of the ‘self to tell itself as a source of good’. Dovey (2000) demonstrates how this works on television through visualising ‘extraordinary subjectivities’ where the basis for truth claims shifts from grand narratives to personal statements about the world. Similarly, Hartley (2004) argues that ‘the self’ is very much at stake in every aspect of television as matters previously considered private are presented as public concerns.

Illouz (1997) maintains this ‘transformation of intimacy’ calls for an extension of notions such as domination and capital to domains hitherto out of reach because the promise of normalization is no longer trusted to the family, kin groups and other institutions of civil society (Clough 2003). ‘Reality’ television, by sensationalizing aspects of everyday lives, displays the new ways in which capital extends into the ‘private’, where capital becomes engaged in the socialization of affective capacities that use emotional performance as a mechanism for entertainment and profit. This visualisation can be seen to be part of a more general trend of subsumption, where creating and accumulating wealth shifts to the immaterial, in which knowledge, education, communication, caring and taking care of the chain of services are central.

Intimacy, self-authorising and morality are key staples of ‘reality’ television, where predominantly working-class participants (White 2006) are invited to perform their moral worth and subject themselves to processes of moral evaluation by expert mediators and the audience, leading to the erosion of the distinction between audience and performers (Biressi and Nunn 2005). The use of ‘ordinary’ people and the domestic verisimilitude of the settings replays moral concerns through assumed immediacy with everyday life (Hartley 1999; Hawkins 2001; Hill 2005) This leads us to Mathieson’s (1997) challenge to Foucualt’s (1977) analysis of power, where he suggests that the panoptical governance structure of the few watching the many has been replaced by a synoptical structure of the many watching and judging the

1 See McTaggart Lecture by Lord John Birt, ex-BBC Director speech to the Edinburgh Festival, August 26, 2005.

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To cite this output: Skeggs, Bev et al (2007). Making Class and Self Through Televised Ethical Scenarios: Full Research Report ESRC End of Award Report, RES-148-25-0040. Swindon: ESRC

performances of the many. We suggest it is the many watching the few, who appear to be ‘ordinary’, without power, but who operate as figures for the circulation of judgement.

Yet the types of judgement incited by ‘reality’ television carry long legacies. Davidoff and Hall (1987) note how in the 1840s a culture of domesticity was established by middle-class women, who were expected to operate as relay mechanisms of manners and morality in ‘the minutiae of everyday life’ to pass on their influence to others. During the twentieth century responsibility was extended to working-class women (see David (1980), and enshrined in law). The extension of responsibility however brought with it increased surveillance, as if working-class women could never be fully trusted, a legacy developed in ‘women’s genre’ television. Harolovich (1992) documents how 1950s sit-coms detailed female failure, re-positioning domesticity from a practice in which pleasure was previously taken, to one in which ‘need to try harder’, ‘advice required’ and ‘transformation necessary’, become significant tropes, repeated across other women’s genres (Hermes 1993; Shattuc 1997).

This shift brought into vision a different object: from the middle-class ‘polite and proper’ family to the dysfunctional working-class family. It is this dysfunctional transformation-required person that is often recruited to and judged on ‘reality’ television, opening a route for the provision of self-care advice: where 'life lessons' offer a window to learning about moral values (Bonner 2003; Hawkins 2001). They also provide a connection to the self-help and therapy industries (Blackman 2004) as governmental and educational exercises in neo-liberal citizenship (Ouellette 2004; Ouellette and Murray 2004).

Strathern (1992) identifies this process as part of a trend towards making middle-class values the national-normative, what Savage (2003) identifies as the new ‘particular-universal’ class. We think ‘reality’ television programmes therefore attempt to establish the ‘order of things’, whereby the historically-established etiquette of the middle-class generates a symbolic template for all social relations, making women responsible for the nation’s propriety. Specific techniques for the display of moral value in the opening out of intimacy are required by the ‘reality’ television format, reproducing another historical legacy whereby ‘speaking the self’ through redemptive narratives is a measure of a good citizen (Steedman 2000). From the 1940s, as Illouz (1997) demonstrates, the belief in the positive value of verbalising emotions was seen to be a way of revealing a true self and solving conflicts. We think televised intimacy requires ‘talking’ to ‘reveal’ the ‘authentic’ self in which a grammar of psychology replaces the grammar of exploitation (Walkerdine 2003). But ‘talking’ requires access to specific educational and linguistic resources and needs to be performed with the right amount of dramatic intensity.

Couldry and McCarthy (2004) propose that people develop a ‘media self’ which is less about the workings of neo-liberal governmentality or individualisation and more about self-reflections on the relationship to governmentality through watching others. This media self has become increasingly deployed in public self-reflexive performance by ‘ordinary’ people (Walkerdine and Lucey 2001). McKenzie (2001) maintains that performance will be to the twenty-first centuries what Foucault’s disciplinary techniques were to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Performance, he notes, is always assessed by output and effect, which, we argue, includes: the long history of ‘measuring work’ (Taylorisim) and productivity measurement though emotional communication (Maslow). The process of responsibility-attribution, revealing-talking, performing, measuring, advising and improving gave us a basic framework for understanding the moral scheme of ‘reality’ television.

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Our model of class was taken from Bourdieu (1979; 1985; 1986; 1987) who identifies four main types of capital: economic, cultural, social, and symbolic. People are distributed in social space according to: the global volume of capital they posses; the composition of their capital, evolution of the volume and composition according to their trajectory in social space. It is not just the volume and composition of the right sort of cultural capital (for national belonging), but it is also how one accumulates it that makes an important difference to its capacity to be converted.

We follow traditions of audience research that have developed the text-reader relationship from Hall's (1980) model of encoding/decoding (Corner 1990; Jhally and Lewis 1992; Morley 1980; Schlesinger, et al. 1992), and which considers women's relationships to denigrated genres (Ang 1985; Engel Manga 2003; Hobson 1982; Hobson 1990; Livingstone 1992; Livingstone and Lunt 1994) and class distinctions in viewing (Press 1991; Thomas 2002; Thomas 1995). We develop audience research on 'first person' television which keeps texts in view (Hill 2005; Hill 2007; Livingstone and Lunt 1994; Lunt 2005) by considering 'para-social' engagements with television (Wood 2008a). By paying attention to moments of engagement, we explore how television viewing is a dynamic social process operating as part of a national moral economy.

Objectives

1. To collect empirical data on self-identity and identity formation in relation to contemporary ethics.

We used interviews to obtain information on how participants describe themselves and relate to categories of identification (race, gender, class, see Appendix 1). Ethical questions about fairness were used to establish what matters to people in social relationships and everyday practices.

Our textual analysis identified recurrent ethical scenarios and located moments where judgements were incited. Our text-in-action viewing sessions identified the responses these incitements induced. Focus groups were then used to elicit group discussions about public debates on ethics.

2. To offer new understandings of contemporary formations of class and gender through an original emphasis on mediated representations.

We focused on the programmes that encourage self-transformation – implying the desirability and possibility of social mobility. Smith’s (1988) ideas of ‘textually mediated femininity’ were developed to understand mechanisms of mediation, which led to analysis of how Butler’s (1990) performativity (for class and gender) worked in situations of ‘forced’ performance on ‘reality’ television. The increased use of non-professional actors on television and the significance of the increased visibility of working-class women and their domestic and emotional labour were mapped and investigated.

We analysed how 10 programmes encouraged different types of self-work and related these to gender and class (e.g. responsibility for parenting, communication, hygiene, taste and femininity), developing a matrix of ‘reality’ television formats and sub-genres (see Appendix 2). Our programmes were located on a scale between fictive boundary and classic documentary to reveal structuring relations (Appendix 7). We then identified the cultural

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resources required to perform on ‘reality’ television and how these were used. Audience research revealed stark class differences about relationships to, and participation on, television.

3. To collect data and archive representations of self-identity and class in selected media (‘reality’ television).

We mapped 42 programme-series from terrestrial TV in the year running up to the start of our project (2004-2005). As the project unfolded ‘reality’ forms mutated rapidly, mixing with other genres, making ‘reality’ television an umbrella term for a variety of sub-genres. We reduced 42 to 10 programme-series to generate detailed textual and sociological themes. We then mapped mediated representations (see Appendix 2). A snapshot of one week in November 2005, produced 92 programmes, (see Appendix 3) demonstrating the extent of the expansion. We collected intertextual media throughout the duration of the project.

4. Develop and undertake a new multi-layered methodological design for the sociological analysis of media reception.

See method section in report.

5. Offer methodological and theoretical insights into the investigation of the role of television in the making of social subjectivity

We used our three empirical methods to allow our participants alternative ways of demonstrating their relationship to ‘reality’ TV – see methods. Our theoretical analysis alerted us to the ways in which audiences were positioned and responded ‘immanently’ to ‘reality’ texts (instead of ‘reading messages’). A dialogue was generated between audience studies in media research (Hall 1980; Morley 1980; Livingstone 1992; Hill 2005) with social theory (Ahmed 2004; Bourdieu 1986; Deleuze and Guattari 1977; Spinoza 1996). We showed how respondents ‘immediated’ (immanently mediate) both ‘reading through’ and making ‘constitutive actualisations’ with television participants (Sobchack).

6. To contribute empirically informed theoretical knowledge on the contemporary character of modern social identity and morality.

We problematised ‘individualisation’ as not sufficiently explanatory of modern social identity.The significance of television as pedagogy was examined (Hill 2005; Bonner 2003; Hartley, 2004). We charted how ethics appeared as both universal and particular, examining implications for different social groups. We identified how a focus on the self actually re-makes rather than uproots relations of class and gender. Our empirical research details how televised ethics are mediated through respondents’ social relations.

7. To understand new forms of moral value and how they are produced by television. 8. To understand how new forms of moral value are made to stick to certain people.

We identified patterns across sub-genres which propose that moral value requires a commitment to self-work. A textual schema was developed to identify how different practices come to be associated with different intensities of moral value (see findings). This tracking process enabled us to show how ‘reality’ television produces a symbolic moral economy of personhood. Our empirical research shows where and how this moral value circulates.

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9. To communicate this new knowledge with academic and cultural/media industry user groups.

See form for outputs and impact.

Methods:We used a multi-method approach: textual analysis of programmes, interviews, 'text-in-action' viewing sessions, and focus groups.

Between 2004-2006 we tracked the explosion of 'reality' television formats following the mutation of the genre and its inter-textual outputs (web, magazines, news). We produced a map to visualise how formats and sub-genres contribute to the 'opening out of intimacy': indexing production techniques against the many areas of intimate life interrogated (see Appendix 2). Out of 42 programmes, 10 self-transformation series were identified rather than ‘event’ television e.g. Big Brother. We matched discourses and performances to wider social theories and rhetoric. In November (2005) we counted every possible ‘reality’ programme from ‘free to air’ channels (92 in total: Appendix 3) capturing the explosion and mutation of the genre during the project.

We demonstrated how the traditions of melodrama and documentary were integrated into the ‘reality’ format, including use of an ‘amateur aesthetic’ (Atton 2002), dramatic conflict, editing, and verisimilitude. We identified how experts used different techniques such as voice-over, advice, castigation, and humour to establish authority, and how legal and psychological discourse was central to establishing ‘expert’ authority.

We tracked the ways in which television participants were encouraged to narrate themselves 'to camera', recording valuations of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Close-up-long-held filming illustrated bad detail - such as dirt - enabling us to visually locate what were deemed to be ‘problems’. This forensic detailing enabled us to identify a process of metonymic morality (see findings). Our transcripts of viewing sessions enabled us to match these moments to audience responses.

Our empirical research evolved over three stages: interviews, text-in-action session and focus groups. We drew our sample of women from locations around South London and with difficulty recruited 40 women from four different family/friendship groups: New Addington (white working class), Forest Hill (mostly white middle class), Brockley (black and white working class) and Clapham (South Asian mainly working-class). (See Appendices 1+4).

Our interviews generated a picture of the women's different types of capital: work, education, housing, habits, taste, motherhood, media use, leisure activities and ethics and whether they felt they 'had a fair deal in life'. We also recorded their television viewing habits, and knowledge of 'reality' television.

We then conducted 'text-in-action' viewing sessions with 36 of our respondents. They decided to take part in this stage alone or in groups of 2 or 3. This method relies on linguistic responses to television, but we found that our women often also responded to the sensational intensity of ‘reality’ through affective 'para-linguistic' responses: tuts, sighs, groans, laughter, etc. With some groups we have long periods of what at the time we experienced as silences and a potential limitation to the method. However, after re-listening to tapes, we realised the

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significance of many of the affective responses that were elicited at key moments in the structure of the text. Our method evolved with our theoretical thinking as we began to see the connections between affective economies (Ahmed 2004) and the incitement of affect by textual techniques on television. We described these moments as 'affective textual encounters' (ATE’s), which were crucial to the moments where moral judgement was made in relation to television.

Our multi-method approach allowed respondents access to different modes of articulation: the middle-class women consistently produced distanced reflexive critique across all methods, whilst the working-class women and the South Asian groups gained access to moral authority through the text-in-action sessions.

Finally, we conducted focus groups to see how ‘reality’ television was addressed in a public forum. We generated questions from our interviews and viewing sessions and used prompts from programmes to generate feedback loops with the different stages of the research. The focus groups, like the viewing sessions, generated very different performances through the use of cultural resources, leading us to propose that methods may 'make', rather than 'find' class.

The ‘Goodness’ paper attached provides a more expansive methodological discussion.

Findings:

Rhetorical links: we detailed the discursive connections to other social spaces of behavioural micromanagement, such as education (Gillies 2005) national social policy (Social Exclusion, ASBOs, the Respect Agenda) national political rhetoric (Haylett 2001), and global rhetoric (Skeggs 2004). Each figured a moral ‘subject of value’ through behaviour.

The government also recognised the governance potential of ‘reality’ television by developing its own ‘ASBO TV’, a £12 million project undertaken under the UK government’s ‘New Deal for Communities’ established to regenerate poor districts (Swinfold (2006). See ‘Spectacular Morality’ paper.

Melodrama/Documentary Immanence

Our textual analyses identified how tropes from melodrama (happenstance, crisis, sensation) combined with documentary realism in a setting of domestic verisimilitude. We charted the repeated production of dramatic intensity through the 'judgement shot': after points of dramatic crisis the participant is held in facial close-up to directly address the camera and called to account for that which is happenstance and beyond their control.

The construction of time and space on ‘reality’ television generates a sense of 'actuality' through its recourse to 'nowness' and 'hereness', rather than through an ontological claim to truth (Kavka and West 2004). We found that actuality provides the conditions for immanent connections to be made by our audiences.

The closer 'reality' formats move to the 'fictive boundary' (see Appendix 7), the more participants are called to 'improvise drama' in immediate situations. Whereas the closer to documentary style a more complete exploration of a longer life narrative is enabled.

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By placing television participants in situations outside of their experience, particularly in the swapping and passing formats, the actualisation of reflexivity is made difficult: reaction rather than reflection is required, making dramatic responses signal moral value, supporting Williams’ (2001) analysis of melodrama as a national 'moral structure of feeling'.

Participants on 'reality' television appear ahistorically reified; drama is played out in the present, occluding social relations and material conditions. Any failure appears as personal rather than social or cultural, limiting the presentation of a more complete 'architecture of the self' (Bennett 2003).

Metonymic morality:We identified how specific aspects of behaviour are designated as immoral (for the self and/or the family and/or the nation), and how bodily parts are used to figure previously accumulated bad behaviour (e.g. fat). In this visual attribution each behavioural or bodily part metonymically represents the ‘whole’ immoral person – ‘the subject without value’. In this process we documented how:

� Good communication is promoted as the key to a better and happier life; improving communication ‘would improve everything else’ (Cameron 2000).

� Parenting practices were organised into component parts, as ‘methods’ taught for the public good (Gillies 2005). Motherhood, in particular was opened out to scrutiny and judgement.

� Emotional management, paying attention to others, servicing, learning, and making an investment in one’s family and one’s self were advocated as essential skills.

� Any form of excess was allocated negative value, in need of improvement (clothing, eating, drinking, etc.), often for the sake of the healthy nation.

� Paradoxically, watching television was identified as a bad practice.

� Unexpected horrific and shocking moments enabled negative affects such as derision and disdain to be attached to certain people and practices.

Television participants were subject to performance review both on the programme and by our respondents. Programme judgement was presented as if universally agreed when specific middle-class practices (historically relieved of their economic requirements) were endorsed.

The potential for transformation was offered through psychological techniques: behaviour modification, but also psychoanalysis-lite, where the inner self has to be revealed in order to be improved.

Transformation was demanded and/or encouraged but made difficult by 1) divorcing skills from knowledge of how to put them into effect (the logic, or episteme that underpins them: Bourdieu) and 2) suggested improvements were frequently divorced from the conditions by which they could be achieved: ‘It showed me a whole new world and all the things I could be doing, but I just can’t’, making social mobility appear to be a meritocratic matter of learning the right skills.

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Participants displayed Couldry’s ‘media self’ by presenting their ‘case’ direct to camera, but were often considered by our respondents to be ‘too knowing’ or ‘inauthentic’ (dividing acting and appeal performances from ‘natural’ behaviour).

Types of connections made by our audiences:

� Voyeurism as entertainment: respondents took pleasure in the intimate details of others’ lives whilst also recognising the production protocols of television.

� They appreciated 'breakthrough moments' where television participants emotionally collapsed and participants were revealed as 'being true to themselves'.

� Proximity: comparisons positioned respondents in a circuit of value judgement, often generating shadenfreude: 'thank goodness my life isn't like that'.

� Taste: comparisons also located respondents’ judgements within a wider hierarchy of symbolic distinction, often not recognised and/or challenged.

� Psychology: respondents enjoyed making assessments of characters’ personalities, inventing psychological stories to redeem or criticise behaviour, connecting to their own behaviour and circumstances.

� Affects: a wide range, from disgust, anger and pity, to sympathy, empathy and joy were evoked, which (like anger and humour) enhanced the viewing pleasure.

� Pedagogy: programmes were used for tips and advice, often structured through 'coping' strategies.

Moral Judgements and Affect

Our text-in-action method revealed the exact places where respondents felt compelled to make statements about, and sometimes directly addressed, television participants. They keyed into the same moments with surprising regularity. Affective reactions (aah! ugh!) were converted into moral shock statements 'Oh my God!' then converted into moral judgements, 'How can they behave like that'. These incitements enable moral judgements to be made, moral positions taken and moral authority tested, resisted or legitimated. This challenges dominant fears about the impact of 'depthless specularity' of ‘reality’ television on public culture (Nichols, 1991) instead suggesting that these programmes are central sites for national moral dialogue.

We demonstrated how the denigration of the genre is implicit in responses by tracing the word 'sad' which is ambiguously used to denote both empathy and judgement of others, as well as self-indictments for watching the genre (Wood 2008b).

A circuit of audience respondents, television participants and television ‘experts’ assessed relationships via a matrix of investment (time, care, love) and returns (time, care, love, sometimes money).

Class Differences

1) Subject/Object relations We found radically different approaches not just to texts but also to the actual object of the television. For some of our middle-class participants the television was given the status of a bad, powerfully corrupting object that could make them addicted and out of control. In some cases the television had to be locked away and hidden from view; in most, it was carefully controlled through taste/educational/political knowledge. Our working-class participants did not

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attribute power to the object of television, nor felt required to display their control of the object. Television was ‘just fun’ ‘good to shout at’ and part of their domestic architecture.

2) Participation on Reality Television Our middle-class participants thought television exploited uneducated vulnerable people, yet maintained that participants were a particular type of person – ‘desperate for celebrity’, ‘generally trashy people’. Our South Asian groups evoked an honour hierarchy, expressing concern about participants’ allowing themselves be shamed. In contrast, our black and white working-class respondents saw ‘reality’ television as an opportunity structure, providing an alternative route to money, or as an opportunity for the public humiliation of badly behaved male partners.

3) Proximity and distanceClass differences were generated through participants’ moral resources: our black, white and South Asian working-class respondents immanently placed themselves within the action: 'this is what I would do/did'; whilst our middle-class respondents made a distanced critique using resources of wider cultural explication, taste hierarchies, and political/cultural knowledge.

Motherhood was used to resource moral judgement by our working-class participants. Yet, proximity and identification do not necessarily create empathy: of the working-class respondents all but the South Asian group were highly critical, displaying strong emotions of antipathy, disgust and/or anger towards ‘experts’ and participants.

Dyer (1977) argues that pleasure from popular entertainment is generated through providing solutions to social tensions. We find pleasure generated through occupation of an oppositional moral high ground in current conditions of constant surveillance.

4) Assessing Labour Our middle-class group thought ‘reality’ television participants did not deserve to ‘get something for nothing’ because they did not have any education or skills (not ‘working hard at things’) other than performing (‘cheap celebrity’).

This was in contrast to our black and white working-class respondents who assessed television participants on the basis of the specific type of labour they performed: ‘just getting on with it’, and ‘not moaning’ were key values enabling worth to be attributed, using the same criteria they would apply to themselves and reproducing indefatigability as a moral value.

These findings suggest that labouring and ‘making an effort’ is a key moral value in middle andworking-class culture, but is defined differently.

Gendered emotional labour enabled connections to be made across class by comparisons to their own relationship labour.

5) Ethic of careHow television participants were shown to care for others was central to how assessments were made by all groups. All participants read through the negative value loadings of racism and abjectness, to find ‘genuine care’ and ‘real relationships’. Making a ‘constitutive ethical actualisation’ enabled respondents to immanently share ethical experiences.

6) Defensive responses

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Our black and white working-class respondents, in particular, took a great deal of pleasure from television participant’s resistance to authority and refusals to take advice.

Very strong defences were made of celebrities Jordan and Jade Goody, displaying resistance to the negative value generally attributed to those positioned as the abject working-class. (See below)

Some judgements could be seen on a scale of symbolic violence: Bourdieu (1989) notes ‘nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies’ (p.19), such as ‘stupid people doing stupid things’.

The social position of the expert was crucial to the assessment made of their legitimacy.

Our South Asian group often blocked interrogation of responses with statements of ‘it’s cultural difference’.

7) Cutting through Race Numerous similar responses emerged from our black and white working-class groups, around assessments of fair deals: which both didn’t think they had. They articulated the problem in terms of investment: they had paid into the nation but returns were not apparent.

Their assessments of labour, care and advice were also consistent. Our black and white working-class participants all liked Jade Goody identifying with her as a ‘ghetto rat’ who ‘stayed real’ just like themselves

Performances of non-pretentiousness were key to the positive evaluation of television participants across the working-class groups, reproducing a historically identified characteristic of working-class culture (Walkerdine 1990).

The South Asian group were trans-national and responses did not produced investment/return analogies. Nor did they make connections to white working-class television participants. They were highly interested in tips and advice and thought television was a good way to learn about British culture. Motherhood and care were central to their engagement, but stronger moral distance was in evidence through shadenfreude ‘I’d never let my children behave like that’, pointing to different moral standards.

Implications:If we had only analysed programmes we could show that the middle-class-particular was indeed becoming universally normative, that neo-liberal techniques were ubiquitous, intimacy had extended into a profit-making performance review, misanthropy rife with the working-class subject to a level of symbolic violence and affective contempt never previously seen. Whilst all this is clearly evident, its impact is not predictable. The quantities and types of defence, refusal, mis-recognition, care, kindness and humorous resistance that emerged from our empirical research makes us suggest that the moral values of ‘reality’ television are reaching their audiences in ways not anticipated.

People are incited to make judgements about the micro-management of their lives through ‘reality’ television, but these incitements address people already positioned by other value strata (work, taste, education, bodies, money) that unevenly combine to produce their overall

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person value as a good/bad subject. Value-defences and value-promotions circulate through responses to television informing the judgements people make.

Individualisation did not figure in these contestations, which were about positioning and value. ‘Performing oneself’, or doing self-reflexivity, to generate self-worth only makes sense if there is consensus about what constitutes self-worth, if the measurement is agreed (Sayer 2005). Our research showed that the supposed universal moral values are often highly contested as moral and particular. Most respondents were not convinced by the values on offer or the techniques by which they could be achieved, contrasting these with their own (staying real, caring, humorous, direct, etc.).

People sometimes do enjoy watching the intimacies of other people’s lives, of how other relationships work, what makes people ‘tick’ and where to buy cheap fashionable clothes to not look fat, but beyond that the ethical scenarios on offer do not produce ethical consensus but invite challenges, and talking back to spurious authority was one of the pleasures we identified.

What we saw in many of our responses was a struggle by respondents to display their value in different ways, to demonstrate how they were valuable legitimate subjects, contributing and part of national propriety. It is therefore the value attached to identity practices rather than the identity categorisation itself that is important. How people connect or detach from others depends on where and how they are positioned within circuits of value. We were positively surprised by the identifications established across class and race through shared cultural value positioning.

Activities, Outputs, Impacts (see form and Appendix 5)

Our methodology is being replicated in large grant application by Dr. Tania Lewis at Monash University, Australia for an internationally comparative project on the impact of ‘reality’ television across Asia.

Future Research Priorities: We identified the moral challenges incited by ‘reality’ television but more research is necessary to figure how our challenges fit into a broader ethical framework.

Because our different methods illuminated difficulties in verbal articulation across different groups, re-listening to transcripts drew our attention to the significance of para-linguisticaffective responses to television. We think this is a major under-researched area for understanding people’s responses to the media.

Most of our audience members had some knowledge of either being on or knowing someone who had been on ‘reality’ television. The bridging of the distinction between audience and performers means that more research is needed into television participation.

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research report background - s3-eu-west · pdf filefor giddens (1991) and beck (1992) ......

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