What follows started as a reaction article to the "Reality TV Goes To Work", by James Poniewozik article in Time magazine, March 8th, 2004, pp.74- 75. However, it's not really a reaction anymore. In the drafting stages it became more of a deconstruction of reality TV using this article as inspiration.
(sigh)
Cameras are waltzing into our workplaces. Managers and CEOs are getting the switch and working our jobs for us on television. It seems no one is safe from the morbid objectification television has to 'offer'. This undialectic television programming to see what it is that people do at work couldn't be further from mere drooling drivel. But it's not just what people are doing at work, it's who's doing the work.
It's true that people are obsessed with watching other people perfom their mundane lives, and when broadcast on television, it projects that mundane-ness as fantastic. It objectifies it. To quote the Time article, "...most people do not end up in their dream jobs; that is, arguably, precisely why millions of people spend long evenings escaping into TV." Nothing could be more mechanical or robotic than our jobs, and yet we're corking out shows like "Now Who's Boss?", and "Switched Up!" We're getting a clear picture of how far TV execs and producers will go to maximize the exploitation. "Now Who's Boss?" selects CEOs and corporate big bosses to take a temporary (and paid) demotion from their empires to work amongst the common man, doing the common man's work. "Now Who's..." is projecting this inexorable criss-cross as empathetic, but rather it is bitingly obsequious. The big bosses are shown as pedantic marytrs to the common worker, magically shown to be taking their own dose of reality within their company. Here, the master does not become the student. The show itself claims to be sociologically dialectic, but is not. It is exploitation of the blue-collar workforce, and a brazen conjecture to glorify the CEOs and the big bosses, shown in television's beautiful, magical nomenclature to compel us to feel empathy for the persons in charge. To word this another way: it is exploitation of both these social parties, however the CEOs are not subjected to the same trials the blue-collar workforce actually experiences since it's only a temporary excursion. To reprint a Salman Rushdie quote from Brenton and Cohen's "Shooting People", p. 7, "The television set, once so idealistically thought of as our window to the world, has become a dime-store mirror instead. Who needs images of the world's rich otherness, when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself- these half-attractive, half-persons- enacting ordinary life under weird conditions? Who needs talent, when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?" And it is precisely these disposable half-people who have TV execs and producers frothing at the mouth at unmentionable profit possibilites.
The ultimate destiny of the contestants on "Now Who's.." is that the workers will go back to their mundane lives of their work life. The fantasty is seeing the CEOs working our jobs, and watching them excel or fuck it up. And seeing the CEOs working alongside the common man is quite appetizing fodder. However, to quote the Time article, "The results are fun, satisfying and probably a decent learning experience. But while the CEOs perform tasks, they never really experience work- the pressure to meet quotas, the fear of layoffs, the need to laugh at the boss's jokes- because they ultimately hold the power." The trade is marketed as an epistemological maneuver, and that is where it owes its success. It says that us, the average worker, the blue-collar worker, the cleaner, the sweeper, the cooker, the server, should be empathetic to the maneuver by the CEOs when they step into our shoes on these shows. It is nothing more than escapism into that paradigm. The conception that this could ever take place outside of a reality TV show like "Now Who's..." is illusionary. But that's what television is: the illusion of reality.
Television is the projection of those in power to commodify and add value to every marketable conception and exploit. Television is the greatest educational tool ever invented, yet it is used for glorification of the mundane by the rich, used to rob humans of their subjectivity and replace it with objectivity. It marginalizes humanity by defining social class with exploitation. In Derrick Jensen's book, "The Culture of Make-Believe", he briefly talks of television's powerful intent to shape and influence culture to conform to its rhetoric. Jensen quotes television critic George Gerbner p. 127-28: "Because most scripts are written by and for men, they project a world in which men rule, and in which men play most of the roles. Television and movies project the power structure of our society, and by projecting it, perpetuate it, make it seem normal, make it seem the only thing to do, to talk about, to think about. Once viewers have become habituated to a certain type of story, they experience great consternation [confusion or dismay, my definition] if you try to change it... by telling a story that is different from what the audience has come to expect, you disturb public sensibilities." He also quoted Gerbner as saying, p. 128, "Television is an agency of the power structure by which those in power represent their fantasies. By doing so they contribute to those fantasies becoming real, becoming a part of the consciousness of each of us." These reality-TV shows I've mentioned achieve this, but ipso facto that the content is contrary to reality un-qualifies it. This is what I mean: "Now Who's.." shows CEOs doing the same work as these blue-collar common men, which is not true. Now, the fabrication of truth has been commodified, the show is marketed as a 'reality-TV' show, and leads the public to believe that nothing in the broadcast is contrary to reality. Again, ipso facto the show negates itself.
However, even though Gerbner stated that "if you try to change it" (the power structure), "by telling a story that is different from what the audience has come to expect" (CEOs flipping burgers and cleaning lavatories), "you disturb public sensibilities", I do not see this "great consternation" from the audience. In fact, I know that to hardcore TV-watchers, reality-TV is fuck-all. Marshall MacLuhan once said, "The medium is the message", and this is what I'm getting at here: that the television audience is proxy for ideological brainwashing by those who control its content. MacLuhan meant that it feels good to participate in your own manipulation. Brenton and Cohen wrote in "Shooting People", p. 8, "Of course, 'reality-TV' is something of an oxymoron, and the term does not hold up to scrutiny. The genre never sought to portray real life, and most producers are open about the intrinsically selective nature of the editing process, and the artificality of the situations in which contestants are filmed... 'reality-TV' is a catchy description more handy for gossip columns and water-cooler conversation than 'various kinds of unscripted entertainment involving members of the public'".
Keep in mind: this show and all other reality-TV shows are edited. I wonder what kind of content gets edited from a show like "Now Who's Boss?". Perhaps unsettled workers get in a conflict with the CEOs. Now I begin to think this is what Gerbner might have meant about "great consternation". If a scene such as that were broadcast, it would wreak national social controversy. People would be furious to see such a spectacle. Yet it might infuriate people to take on their bosses themselves in revolt. That would not be a good venture from a marketing standpoint, which in television, is the bottom line. Yet it makes sense that the only real aspects of reality-TV are probably those scenes that hit the cutting room floor. Of course, none of this deconstruction of reality-TV appears in Time's nomenclature. And there's no reason it should, since Time is owned by Time-Warner, the largest mega-media corporation in the world. That's Murdoch's empire. I would certainly not put it past them to diss on reality-TV. Poniewozik's article is merely nothing more than an advertisement for these shows, even though he touched on the aspect of the CEOs never really experiencing the work they are doing on camera.
Posted by Noah D Richardson at April 5, 2004 07:51 PM