COMM 123 Chapter Notes - Chapter 0: Schadenfreude, Reality Television

• School: UPenn
• Department: Communications
• Course: COMM 123
• Professor: Felicity Paxon

Document Summary

Some audiences find value in seeing themselves through the eyes of another. Audiences enjoy feeling contempt or schadenfreude toward the shows participants. New monitoring technology for reality shows subject candidates to visual scrutiny by hosts and viewers. Cultural and psych approaches suggest a fundamental relationship between being seen and the sense that one exists. To have social and political power requires being acknowledged at all. Mark andrejevic- reality show participants submit to constant surveillance in part to have their authenticity affirmed as self-knowing and expressive subjects. Reality tv naturalizes and intensifies ability to look oneself in the eye by displacing the gaze on potentially millions of watchers. Desire to watch and be watched = endless pursuit of confirmation of selfhood among the loss of other more certain life trajectories (wood and skegg"s) Surveillance offers evidence of "the real" facilitated both by cooperation of intimate others and by the technologies and processes of reality television formats.