Page 181 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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166 Now
In this context of the media’s framing power, Banality TV repre-
sents a mature development of the consequences of aura’s irrevoca-
ble decline. Benjamin praised the early stages of this decline, but in
its full maturity one finds much darker, more alienating aspects:
Everything is up for grabs in a gigantic reshuffling of the stuff
of everyday life. Everything, that is, is subject to interpretation
by television as a story-telling machine … The struggle for
interpretive hegemony that ensues (who can make their story
stick?) relocates social experience within highly charged webs of
significance that only remain as stable as the persuasive power
supporting them.
(Nichols 1994: 43; emphasis added)

Here we see a close match between Nichols’s ‘gigantic shuffling of
the stuff of everyday life’ and Dovey’s ‘pre-digested detail of everyday
life’. The critical point (in both senses) they share is a sense of the
disempowerment experienced by those facing the media as everyday
life is processed into the media’s terms. Whatever interpretive
strategies audiences attempt to adopt are always reacting to this prior
structural fact that interpretations are based upon the output of a
story-telling machine rather than a pool of raw information generated
as spontaneously and with as little bias as possible. Highly charged webs
of significance is an evocative description of the social consequences
of the theoretical issues addressed in Part 1. It cogently expresses
not only Adorno’s and Kracauer’s respective focuses upon the culture
industry and Ratio, but also the abstract, but nonetheless influential
and pervasive nature of the whole social environment so created (à
la McLuhan) in which the society of the spectacle (Debord) seamlessly
blends the power of the image with a society-defining system of
commodity production.

Social porn and Baudrillard’s seduction

They’re expected to deliver what I call, borrowing from film
pornography, the ‘money shot’ of the talk-show text: joy,
sorrow, rage, or remorse expressed in visible, bodily terms.
(Grindstaff 2002: 19)
Television talk shows represent a new pornography as they
turn private affairs into public displays, make spectacles of
people in order to sell commercial products, showcase deviance
for our amusement, and play a deceptive game under the guise
of truth … Pornography generally involves turning people into
objects and making public what is private. Talk shows do

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