Page 175 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 6 SESS: 10 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 8 09:09:07 2007 SUM: 4EE77FDE
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap07

160 Now
and narratives of personal recovery and growth’ (Dovey 2000: 121).
Dovey is largely pessimistic about the potential for television to
escape the commodity form but he sees at least some potential in
such formats as the UK’s BBC Two’s Video Nation in the mid-1990s
which provided short (two minutes on average) first-person accounts
from a range of UK citizens. The strength of this format is its
non-commodified, unresolved nature but its limited impact can be
assessed from its tiny (and now defunct) contribution to the overall
scheduling of British television. A much more significant part of the
schedules, however, is taken up by the recent spate of docudrama
formats that in a later evolution merged with celebrity-orientated
formats.
A critical account of such programmes centres upon their innately
commodified nature. The analyses of Dovey (2000) and Langer
(1998) point to the way in which docudramas are constructed as
portraits of the inner workings of the new service economy. Reality
TV becomes a discursive mobilization geared towards helping viewers
locate themselves amid the disorientating flows of advanced capital-
ism (they are an uncritical, commodified manifestation of Jameson’s
[1991] more radical call for new strategies of cognitive mapping with
which to orientate oneself for resistance not accommodation). As in
Lowenthal’s previously cited analysis, the dominant frame of cultural
reference in Reality TV is one of consumption. Non-celebrity doc-
udramas, for example, frequently focus upon working life within the
service industries, while conspicuous consumption is a consistently
prominent theme within celebrity-based versions – in either case
commodity values are foregrounded. For Langer, Reality TV serves to
naturalize further the dominant meaning system of capitalism among
a large swathe of middle-class society formerly relatively insulated
from the vagaries of global capitalism but now vulnerable to its
changeable and flux-ridden nature. Dovey’s account reinforces Lang-
er’s as he points out that the frequent siting of such programmes in
commercial spaces gives them the tenor of:
‘a new ethnography of consumerism, leisure and aspirational
desire … In the world of docu-soap all human endeavour
occurs in a zone that is enforced holiday camp, airport and
mega-mall rolled into one – a zone where the aspirational
desires of consumption and mass social mobility are played
out.’ 4
(Dovey 2000: 140)
Docudramas seldom contain a serious argument or rational purpose.
Like Barker’s holiday reading, they typically consist of images and
situations to be consumed quickly and uncritically. This resonates
with Sontag’s (1979) criticism that you cannot agree or disagree with
a photograph – it is simply not in the nature of the medium’s

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap07 F Sequential 6

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville