Student number: 27963226 I see you watching me watching you and now you see just where my PIPs gotta be (road traders, you watching me). 1 1 Nicolson, Reality TV, 27th November 2003 1 Student number: 27963226 A post-modernist investigation into the role of “Gogglebox”, “The Bachelor” and “The Farmer Wants a Wife” in the formation and perpetuation of Australian gender identity. CONTENTS LOG 3 INTRODUCTION 5 CENTRAL MATERIAL 7 REALITY BITES ……………………………………………………………………………………….7 THE SNOOKI EFFECT…………………………………………………………………………….10 THE REALITY PRICNIPLE………………………………………………………………………..13 THE BACHELOR……………………………………………………………………………….…..15 THE FARMER WANTS A WIFE…………………………………………………………………. 18 GOGGLEBOX……………………………………………………………………………………….20 THE NEED FOR EMPATHY ………………………………………………………………………23 CONCLUSION …………………………………………………….…………..…………………………..24 RESOURCE LIST ……………………………………………….……………………….………………26 APPENDIX ……………………………..……………………………………….........................35 2 Student number: 27963226 LOG Choosing my PIP topic seemed pretty simple - reality television! Something I consume everyday and spend endless hours absorbing. In particular I was set on investigating the role that mass mediated reality television plays in the construction of identities. However, this was not going well as the topic was too broad and I needed to narrow it down. I thought about it for some time and thought why not focus on adolescents? I am an adolescent so using self reflection will allow me to have a stronger argument. I then needed to think carefully about which reality television shows to focus on. Since there is a plethora of reality television shows I thought about the shows that adolescents largely consume. I decided to focus on three series, two involving dating shows and one challenging to categories. Before I began conducting my primary research I needed to undertake extensive secondary research. I looked at a range of print and digital sources. Specifically I examined scholarly articles, expert opinions, media articles and books. The secondary information which I read made me realise how much of an affect that mass mediated reality television does have on the construction of identities on adolescents. This helped me decide what methods I wanted 3 Student number: 27963226 to use and who to conduct them with. I began my primary research by conducting two surveys eliciting both qualitative and quantitate data within my micro community which focused on exploring the role that mass mediated reality television plays within their life. The questions consisted of open ended questions allowing for more detailed responses and closed ended questions allowing me to build upon my quantitative data. One of the surveys I conducted was distributed to a year 10 class. The other was posted onto my social media account Facebook. However, with posting this online I was aware of issues relating to validity, bias and usefulness. These two surveys combined allowed me to have a deeper insight into adult and adolescent perspectives on reality television and the effects. To add complexity and further understand the role reality television plays within adolescents I performed a non participant observation on a year 11 class. The participants watched a series of each The Bachelor and The Farmer wants a Wife while i recorded their reactions and behaviors. Following the observation I conducted a focus group to gain additional qualitative data which i supplemented with my own personal reflection. I performed two structured interviews to augment my qualitative data. My first interview was with a past contestant from the reality television show, “The Farmer wants a Wife”. The participant coming 2nd place and provided me with an into what went on behind the scenes in the series that she was involved in. The second interview i conducted was with a production assistance who has worked on such shows such as “Backyard Blitz”. She provided me with an insight into the complexity of choosing the contestants and “manufacturing” the day to day dramas. My time management when writing my central material was adequate, however, the editing process could have been handled better. I then discovered how important it is to allocate time for each aspect of the PIP. I was consistent throughout my PIP on conducting research methods in an ethical way complying with the participants who wished to remain anonymous. 4 Student number: 27963226 INTRODUCTION Reality television is unpredictable. It penetrates all channels of our television space and has become a stable of my television diet. I just can’t look away when the voyeurism in me needs be shocked and entertained by the world and wonderful lives of reality television land. My micro world seems so bland in comparison to the macro world of these global fads, stars and phenomenon’s. Thus, I will be examining the role of mass-mediated reality television in the construction of personal identities and gender. Reality television influences individual’s self-identities as they foster in values and qualities for the audience to embrace but disguises them as entertainment. This popular culture insinuates these ideas into our everyday norms; reality television compromises social cohesion – which it is meant to support – on the altar of entertainment. I believe this impact strongly shapes our social and cultural development surreptitiously. Given the plethora of reality television shows and the limits imposed by the PIP requirements I have decided to focus on three programs, two within the genre of dating 5 Student number: 27963226 shows - “The Bachelor” and “The Farmer Wants a Wife” and one unique difficult to categorise show - “Gogglebox". Through this investigation I am going to examine through a combination of primary and secondary research methods how reality TV impacts on the construction of personal identities and genders. The secondary sources will include print and digital media such as books, blogs, articles and professional opinions. The primary methodologies include a focus group, observation, two surveys, two interviews and personal reflection. My PIP will address continuity and change. Reality has gone from the traditional form of us the viewers watching peoples’ everyday regimes to us the consumers watching people watch reality television. This change has taken reality television to a new extreme and is explored through the reality television show “Gogglebox”. It will also explore micro experience is through myself as a consumer of reality television. The meso is the interactions within institutions that make the television show and the macro interaction is how the show itself is made. I will explore all these levels in my PIP. As well as this, in my PIP I will use a cross-cultural perspective of gender to aid my perspective. Through the cross cultural component of gender my topic links to the course as it deals with the construction of identities and gender and uses the popular cultural of television to explore the concepts of continuity and change in relation to the significant agent of socialisation. 6 Student number: 27963226 CENTRAL MATERIAL Reality Bites So you’re home in your pjs on your couch in front of your new Samsung smart TV with time to kill. You begin to channel hop and come across a show where you the viewer are watching people watch reality TV. You then start to scroll through and channel after channel you see shows with people singing to win a career, people cooking in the hope of winning $250,000, ‘boganologists’ searching for Australia's biggest bogan and even the dramas of the Kardashian family and Jersey Shore. You begin to wonder who does the Bachelor choose? Who will be the biggest loser? Does the farmer get his wife? But just how real is reality TV and what impact does it have on the construction of identity and in the case of dating shows the construction of gender? In January 1973 the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead published a challenging essay which provided insight into the origins of the genre of reality TV. The subject of this essay was a new public broadcasting system called “An American Family”. This was based on a family, the Louds, who were a middle class Californian household. The parents and the five 7 Student number: 27963226 children in this show were not actors or public figures. Mead wrote; “rather they were the people they portrayed on television, members of a real family”. This television series, from Mead’s perspective was “a new kind of art form” - an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel”2. It is now 30 years since Mead - who died in 1978 foreshadowed the era of reality television that we are living through. At the time she indicated that we needed a name for it and we have come to settle on “Reality Television”. Given the complexity of the topic I needed to undertake extensive secondary research with my focus being on the origins of this genre. What I learned was that this genre is at the very least provocative if not a misnomer. It is according to an article written for the New Yorker magazine in 2009 by Kelifa Sanneh, an amorphous category. In the article Sanneh quoted an American cultural theorist, Mark Andrejevic who observed that, “There isn't any one definition that would capture all of the existing genres and exclude other forms of programming such as the nightly news or day time game shows”3. Accordingly given the plethora of reality television shows and dating shows in particular and the limits imposed on my research I decided to focus on two series within the sub genre of dating shows - “The Bachelor” and “The Farmer Wants a Wife” and one difficult to categories show - “Gogglebox”. My next step was to ascertain the popularity of these two dating shows amongst both adult and adolescent males and females. Surveying both adults and adolescents was important because the latter are according to Erikson and Kohlerg at a stage where they need acceptance and are therefore more impressionable then adults.