Mark Andrejevic: Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · audience, mass media, public broadcasting, reality tv, television
Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of “Big Brother” to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watched. The author enlists critical social theory to examine how the appeal of “the real” is deployed as a pervasive but false promise of democratization.
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
Series: Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture
ISBN 0742527484, 9780742527485
Length 253 pages