Unit 9: Television as Ritual

Question 1

List the kinds of game shows that are on television and discuss the ideologies operating behind them.

Answer 1

• Dating game shows: heterosexual ideologies; marriage/love ideologies; traditional, conservative ideologies
• Panel game shows: star power/celebrity ideologies
• activity oriented game shows
• trivia/puzzle game shows: capitalism; literacy; class differences; wealth and education
• reality tv game shows: individualism; sexism; racism

Question 2

Discuss the development of the talk show into its present form and evaluate the positive and negative attributes of these kinds of shows.

Answer 2

• the talk show was a place to gather gossip about stars but, as talk shows evolved, their focus moved from celebrity guests and their latest movies or songs, to the reactions of the host.
• When talk shows are not deconstructing themselves these days, they are heading into uncharted psychological waters and involving not celebrities but members of the public and the audience.
• The talk show creates, with audience participation and an ostensibly caring interviewer, a communal environment—but only the illusion of community. This “contributes to the narrative that all opinions count equally in this democratic global village.”

Question 3

Draw distinctions and point out similarities between tabloid and other kinds of news.

Answer 3

Distinctions:

Similarities:

• inject overt biases
• use gossip and sensationalization to allure an audience

Question 4

Analyze the kinds of ideologies that news reflects and maintains.

Answer 4

• the news media therefore play a crucial role in any democracy, amortizing the costs of gathering and filtering news across many citizens, lowering the costs of acquiring political information, and strengthening private incentives to become informed.
• political ideologies depend on the media outlet; it could be conservative or progressive; with a point of view or objective.
• maintaining the status quo
• nationalism

Question 5

Determine the degree to which news is based on fact, gossip, or storytelling.

Answer 5

• news is typically based on fact because they are subject to public scrutiny if it found that it was lied.
• however news stories can lead to gossip if worded a particular way or told a certain way
• storytelling is inherent in news because people typically are more engaged in the news when it is told as a story.
• News relies on conflict in making a good news story as it is in making a good fiction, and its relationship to the social system is similar.

Question 6

Reading - “Self-Despotism: Reality Television and the New Subject of Politics.”

Answer 6

• reality television applies to a group of programs occasionally referred to as “reality games.” It applies strictly to Big Brother and a group of closely related programs, as well as to previous waves of reality programs and programming trends that are supposed to be outside the genre, notably in documentary and current affairs.
• The elements include: a format with a “bible”; based on a cast of contestants who compete for a prize over a series of episodes with a final winner; escape the routine of long-term scheduling.
• the promise of real is used to describe how television audiences seek “real” and “authenticity” in their programs
• three major positions on reality tv: trash TV position (holds that television debases cultural sensibilities in relation to a market-led political economy); empowerment position (gives “ordinary people,”who have undisguised genuine preoccupations, a chance of access to public discourse); reality tv as nightmare position (the ultimate example of simulacrum, opening an era of undifferentiation between the real and its representation, with concomitant loss of any anchoring of public debate in a common public reality)
• Soft despotism refers to the transformation of democracy we are experiencing, without understanding the ambivalence that remains at the heart of democracy, the self-subjection that democratic citizens seem willing to impose on themselves. So Bourdon calls reality shows a form of soft despotism he calls self-despotism, where the self is both the subject and the agent of despotism.

Question 7

Reading - “News Readings, News Readers.”

Answer 7

• Written by John Fiske
• News is a commodity. It’s expensive to gather and distribute, and must produce an audience that is of the right size and composition to be sold to advertisers.
• In textual terms, the news isn’t much different from a soap opera, but there are real differences in the way that the audience and producers understand and approach the two genres.
• The news text is engaged in a constant struggle to contain the multifarious events and their polysemic potential within its own conventions.
• The news way of making sense of the real and of controlling its potentially anarchic polysemy follow those two familiar semiotic axes of the paradigmatic (selection and categorization) and the syntagmatic (combination and narrativization).
• For an event to be deemed newsworthy it should be recent, concern elite persons, be negative, and be surprising.
• News is largely about “the masculine” and aimed at a male audience, so news stories are structure to provide a point of narrative closure that approximates that of masculine fictional narrative.
• News is subdivided into the following categories: politics, the economy, foreign affairs, domestic news, occasional stories, and sport.
• The practice of categorizing social life into neat compartments is an essentially reactionary one, because it implies that a “problem” can be understood and solved within its own category.
• Exnomination has no alternative and is thus granted the status of the natural, the universal, or that-which-cannot-be-challenged.