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Book Details
Abstract
True confessions, fake films and docu-soaps - in the last ten years factual television has been transformed by an explosion of new genres. Freakshow offers a serious look at 'reality TV' in an attempt to understand the mass media’s fascination with intimacy, deviancy, and horror.
Jon Dovey analyses reality TV in terms of the political economy of the mass media. He investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal the only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives? Are the politics of the self the only alternative to the defunct grand narratives of yesterday?
In concentrating not on the reception of these new television forms but on the choices, models and agendas which inform their production, Dovey reveals the relationships between social anxieties, economic pressures and their specific inflections in media texts. In a critical analysis of media industry practice, Dovey asks why directors can't stay out of range of their own cameras - and what is the role of the television of intimacy within broadcasting.
'An extremely timely discussion of the extraordinary boom in reality TV in recent years'
Joe Moran - American Studies Today
'A timely and much needed theoretical analysis of carefully contrived first person media and analyses the changing nature of factual television'
Intensities: the Journal of Cult Media
Table of Contents
Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
---|---|---|---|
Contents | vii | ||
Acknowledgements | viii | ||
Introduction | 1 | ||
1. Show Me the Money | 5 | ||
Cheating | 5 | ||
The Public Sphere? | 14 | ||
Re-Scheduling - A Sample Survey | 17 | ||
A Public Sphere Turned Inside Out | 21 | ||
Notes | 175 | ||
Chapter 1 | 175 | ||
Chapter 2 | 177 | ||
Chapter 3 | 178 | ||
Chapter 4 | 179 | ||
Chapter 5 | 181 | ||
Chapter 6 | 182 | ||
Chapter 7 | 183 | ||
2. Klutz Films | 27 | ||
'I Don't Think Anybody Believes In Objectivity Anyway . . . | 28 | ||
Downsizing the Documentary | 35 | ||
Boys Fess Up | 40 | ||
Nobody ’s Business - But My Own | 47 | ||
Historical Contexts | 50 | ||
Notes | 177 | ||
3. Camcorder Cults | 55 | ||
Video, Technology and Cultural Form | 55 | ||
Video Virus | 57 | ||
Zero Degree Simulation | 62 | ||
Reality Porn | 65 | ||
Video Fool for Love | 71 | ||
Notes | 178 | ||
4. Firestarters - Re-viewing Reality TV | 78 | ||
What's Real about Reality TV? | 79 | ||
Marketing Reality | 81 | ||
Trash TV - Empowerment - Nightmare? | 83 | ||
The Disappearance of Reality | 88 | ||
Packaging Pathology | 91 | ||
Leaking Genres and Magical Helpers | 95 | ||
The Hollywood Ending | 98 | ||
unReality TV | 100 | ||
Notes | 179 | ||
5. The Confessing Nation | 103 | ||
Silence is Guilt | 103 | ||
Opening the Box - Foucault's Confessional | 105 | ||
Television's Matrix of Selfhood | 108 | ||
It's Good to Talk - the Chat Show Debates | 114 | ||
Postcards from Reality - the Video Nation Project | 121 | ||
Notes | 181 | ||
6. McDox 'R'Us - Docu-soap and the Triumph of Trivia | 133 | ||
The Cuckoo in the Nest | 133 | ||
Direct Cinema Goes Shopping | 138 | ||
Soap Bubbles | 140 | ||
The Return of the Voice of God | 142 | ||
Everything is Visible but Nothing Matters | 144 | ||
Flyblown Naturalism | 146 | ||
Private Characters, Public Stories | 149 | ||
Arguing about the World | 150 | ||
An Accumulation of Naturalistic Debris | 152 | ||
Notes | 182 | ||
7. Squaring Circles | 154 | ||
It's Only TV? | 155 | ||
Public Relations | 156 | ||
Superfamilial Zones Of Familiarity | 162 | ||
Pleasure and Difference | 164 | ||
First Person Public Service | 166 | ||
Keeping It Raw | 171 | ||
Notes | 183 | ||
Bibliography | 185 | ||
Index | 189 | ||
abuse, disclosure of, 111 | 111 | ||
access to media 157-8 | 157 | ||
access to media, 4 | 4 | ||
accuracy, lower standards of 13 | 13 | ||
Airline 135 | 135 | ||
Airport | 134 |