Page 170 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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7

Banality TV: the democratization

of celebrity

Introduction

How is it that the pre-digested detail of banal everyday life has
become the ratings phenomenon of late nineties UK prime-
time?
(Dovey 2000: 1; emphasis added)

At a time when television and the media are increasingly
unable to give an account of the world’s (unbearable) events,
they have discovered daily life and existential banality as the most
deadly event, the most violent news, the very scene of the
perfect crime. And indeed it is. People are fascinated, fasci-
nated and terrified by the indifference of the Nothing-to-say,
Nothing-to-do, by the indifference of their very existence.
(Baudrillard 2005: 182; emphasis added)
Baudrillard argues that essentially empty, tautological and vacuous
media content can still be fascinating in an absorbing rather than
revealing sense. It produces much interpretive activity (the focus of
cultural populism), but from a critical perspective this activity
reflects, rather than challenges, cognition’s enervation at the hands
of Ratio. Banality TV resonates with Dovey and Baudrillard’s cogent
phrases ‘the pre-digested detail of banal everyday life’ and ‘existential
banality’ – descriptions of the excessively personalized and trivial
approach, tone and content of entertainment programmes that have
now also become standard features of news programmes to the
extent that factual entertainment is now used as the title of television
company departments (for example, the UK’s Channel 4). The
sentiment behind the term Banality TV is already evident in Kracau-
er’s comments about the cultural films that prefigured Reality TV.
More critical than McLuhan’s enthusiastic embracing of the media’s
mosaic quality, Kracauer is scathingly unambiguous about the banality
of its cultural consequences in everyday practice:

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