Ethics and Reality TV

Published Date: 13 Sep 2016 Last Modified: 15 Jan 2018

Abstract

Reality TV, like many other postmodern spectacles, operates on a deeply tenuous and ambiguous ethical grounding. On the one hand, the audience / creator model of exploitation can be seen as providing the viewer with entertainment and escapism. On the other it can be said to create a system of dependency and artificial need. The ethics of participation in game show style reality offers a similar contradiction which is dependent upon whether participants are free to choose, or whether they are in fact coerced by elements beyond their control. This dissertation will look at the various factors and paradigms (psychoanalytical, Marxist, poststructuralist) that constitute this model of reality. This requires a certain concretisation of terms such as ethics, and of what constitutes “reality” itself. The dissertation will also look at the politics of reality TV itself – namely, does Reality TV constitute a unique event in the development of television, or does it merely reflect a continuation for television producers to create ever more innovative methods of keeping our interests satiated? Is Reality TV itself the origin of the moral crimes, or is Reality TV merely a reflection of the ethical climate of capitalism in which we live? Finally, the dissertation will look at the possible futures for “reality” TV.

Methodology

As this dissertation is largely discursive in nature, and involves a widespread discussion of general philosophical and ethical themes, I will purely refer to secondary material. This will be assisted by the large and abundant materials that exist on the matter of “Reality” TV, ethics, and the conjoining of the two. I will use library materials, newspaper and magazine materials, as well as the raw footage of the Reality TV itself to generate an opinion and an overall discussion about the general impacts, considerations and ethical standards of reality TV, and whether constructive change is a) desirable and b) possible. What are Ethics?

Ethics have proven to be a central part of philosophical enquiry for thousands of years. As such, it would be useful to summarize what and how this theory has developed over the years, and what tends to form the debate around “ethics” now. This is essential in order to gauge the relationship between “good” ethical conduct and the recent phenomenon of reality TV. Ethics was originally conceived as a way to engage with morals – literally, it can be seen as an attempt to establish a “moral philosophy” for living, and is concerned about notions such as what is right and what is wrong. It exposes the various difficulties between making certain decisions or of living life in a particular way. Understandably, the concept and the notion of good moral behaviour and bad moral behaviour have changed radically since the initial formulation of Western ethics in Ancient Greece over 2000 years ago. While modern moral reasoning bases its understandings upon the writings of Plato and Aristotle, it has mutated radically as regards to who the subject of the writing actually is concerned with. Whereas Plato, Aristotle and the ancient Greeks were concerned more about the self – e.g. how to morally explain the individual – whereas the modern ethical practice is more concerned about how to treat others in the first instance. Annette Hill comments that “Modern moral philosophy is therefore primarily about public good, and the development of moral values within particular social, political and cultural groups, and also within particular secular societies.” (2005, p. 110). Rather than acting, then justifying behaviour, modern ethics are primarily concerned about what exactly one should do in the first place, and is about the relationship between the self and society, the promotion of the notion of the “public good”, and of partaking in particular acts, often against the self or the will that would otherwise have a harmful effect on society.

Major paradigmatic models incorporate this model of public good into their progressive ideologies. Central to the Marxist model (which I will be later applying to the phenomenon of reality TV), is the relationship between the working classes and the ruling classes. This is argued in Marx as being ethically dubious, because while the proletariat are enslaved by the capitalist system by their work, the ruling classes benefit from this relationship infinitely. Therefore, from a Marxist context, capitalism and the ways in which this model distributes wealth can be seen as the primary mechanism from which morality is corrupted. Similarly, religion and faith is often touted as “scapegoats” for unethical behaviour. The existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche formulated his own quasi-religion / moral philosophy based on the concepts of the Ubermensch and the theories of eternal recurrence. His position is existential, and forms a central part of what constitutes ethical matters today. Existentialism is, put simply, a belief that man creates his own belief systems. The existence of something precedes its essence; namely, the process of doing something is more important than the assignation of certain methods of thinking or reasoning behind it. A person is not innately good, but instead he acts good. Robert Anton Wilson (1990) comments that “Nietszsche’s existentialism (1) attacked the floating abstractions of traditional philosophy and a great deal of what passes as ‘common sense’ (e.g. he rejected the terms ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘the real world’, and even the ego.) (2) also preferred concrete analysis of real life situations […] and (3) attacked Christianity, rather than defending it” (14-15). As such, an existential critique of reality TV would tend to eschew concrete moral conclusion based on the grounding that reality TV exploits people, and therefore it is bad – moreover, the phenomenon of reality TV is based upon a number of larger social trends and mechanisms; a whole system of belief that doesn’t necessarily taint reality, but actually comprises of reality. Therefore, the existentialist may attack Reality TV, but Nietzsche would presumably argue that it is an expression of human will, Marx would argue that it represents merely an extension of the capitalism that seeks to exploit the workers and Kierkegaard would argue that his role is to determine that people have the choice to make their own decisions. Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were not concerned about notions of abstract truth – they were existential insofar as their concern was about day to day existence. In the absence of the notion of truth, over Nietzsche’s “will to power” and Kierkegaard’s system of choice and personal autonomy, the system of modern moral philosophy was overturned by the new ethical paradigm. Nietszche argued that the ubermensch would not do bad things because it would be detrimental to his own will to power; a moral system of good and bad is, ultimately, irrelevant to the ubermensch, because the parameters of decision-making have been changed.

This ethical reasoning in many ways bled into the individualism of psychoanalysis, which is a factor that comes into play in a great many of the reality TV programmes: as I will argue later, the obsession in reality TV with rendering perverse the Freudian neuroses (described by him as anal, oral and genital fixations), combined with the capitalist, consumerist desire to pacify the “slaves” within the semiotic network that constitutes television, creates a scenario whereby the human self is rendered obscene. A psychoanalytical analysis of Reality TV creates many discrepancies; moreover, it is the combination of pacifying the autonomous will of the individual, combined with the exposition of Freudian unconscious “discoveries” that makes reality TV objectionable to mainstream technical issues. However, before I try to extrapolate the various issues at stake in the arguments for and against reality TV, the concept of reality TV, in particular what the term “reality” means in this context, has to be explored.

What is the “reality” in Reality TV?

Jean Baudrillard and other philosophers coined “poststructuralist” by Western scholars would undoubtedly be impressed by the ironical use of the term “reality” in reality TV. One of Jean Baudrillard’s key issues is the argument for “hyperreality”. He suggests in Simulacra and Simulation (1994) that the hyperreal is “real without origin or reality” (1). Indeed, the concept of “reality” TV where participants are asked to stay in an enclosed space for weeks on end and told to do surrealistic things (Big Brother), or to stay on a desert island (Temptation Island, Survivor) is unreal in itself, but the term “reality” instead applies to the logic that contestants exist rather than actors or performers. It is a “genre” of TV in which the controlled amateurish quality of the programme is exaggerated into a package of neuroses that have usurped and transcended reality itself. Secondly, TV is edited, disseminated and packaged in a particular way that, according to Baudrillard, substitutes itself for reality; in one judgement of hyperreality, Baudrillard suggests that it represents “more real than real”, and eventually usurps reality. The concept of “reality” in reality TV destroys the “sovereign difference” between the map and the territory (1994, 2). As such, reality TV exists as an exemplar of this particular moment in late capitalism where the simulation of reality has evaded and transcended the real itself. To stress this theory further, I will look more generally at what Baudrillard means by hyperreality, and cite some further examples of how this theory can be established. Like Nietzsche, Baudrillard begins with an interrogation of the “real world”, arguing that because our perceptions of reality are rooted in semiotic languages and discursive structures, that the concept of an external, objective reality outside of the self cannot be established, and merely bases itself upon a chimera or a lie. Instead, Baudrillard argues that reality is merely a system of communication, in which reality has become a commodified, capitalistic device. In The System of Objects, Baudrillard offers a critique of the advertising industry. While many of the images used by, say, the automobile industry are deliberately faked or exaggerated, the nature of this exaggeration, and the extent to which these images are promoted over and above the actual reality of what the car is (ultimately, a device for getting from one place to another), the specific, advertised car itself becomes an impossible object – a representation of reality that lies beyond reality itself. For instance, recent advertising that features a car that transforms into a dolphin does not have any prescience in reality, nor does it even attempt to establish itself as real. Instead, it embodies in the vehicle certain images or “realities” that, according to Baudrillard, become reality and, as such, substitute reality for a marketed, plasticised illusion that “represents” reality to a greater degree. This theory can be extended to encompass many other factors that seem based upon manufacturing and colonising the real. Pornography represents a reality of sex that transcends and usurps sex itself; a soft drink with a non-existent flavour, such as “wild ice zest berry” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality) creates a “reality” in linguistic terms that has no relationship to “modern” as opposed to “postmodern” reality. Again, advertising generates a reality that exaggerates and simulates the real in totality; there is no attempt made to reproduce reality, but instead signs and signification operate within themselves, applying to only their own logic.

This reality can be seen in terms of reality TV as well. Programmes such as Survivor, Big Brother and other reality TV programmes that synthesise the game show format tend to exaggerate the realities of the participants. The world in which these “real” people interact is one which is completely fabricated, usually to exaggerate some narrative or mythological scenario which the viewer is undoubtedly familiar with. Big Brother, for instance, plays with the familiar Orwellian notion of total surveillance and dystopia – Survivor plays on the themes of the desert island, featured in many historical and literary myths that date back to the Bible. As such, depending on what opinions we have about what reality constitutes, these types of program are undoubtedly far off the mark. Post-production techniques are used to exaggerate the dramatic tensions between people; often people who would ordinarily have no contact are forced into relationships with one another, and it has been insinuated that certain parts of reality TV are scripted beforehand, in order to prevent the programme from becoming tedious or formulaic.

What does this development in the notion of “reality” do to a discussion of the ethics of reality TV? Firstly, the production processes of reality TV are heavily reliant upon advertisers and private corporations concerned about making money. Such companies do not generally have too scrupulous a reputation for ethical marketing or behaviour. Product placement is a regular feature in reality TV, which, if looked at from a Marxist point of view, leads to the synthesis of what is seen as common sense “reality” and of corporate desire. The existential view of reality, while in a kind of agreement with the ambiguity of reality TV, would argue that reality as it is presented here merely represents a faith or a religion that substitutes the pure will (choice or autonomy) of the individual into a scenario where all things are scripted, edited and controlled by forces that depend upon the viewer becoming pacified and infantilized. I argue that the reality in reality TV merely represents a particular version of reality. As post-structuralist philosophy would suggest, the notion of objective reality in the postmodern age is simply a psychologically, sociologically and metaphysically attuned network that serves to create a religion or a mythical structure of “truth” and “reality”. While Nietzsche would argue that Reality TV subdues the personal will, and of human folly and weakness, reducing the viewer to the level of passive consumer, he would also argue that it is not the ethical place of people to assume that this dynamic of “exploitation” (as Marxists would posit) is necessarily wrong. Indeed, criticisms of Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity, while vitriolic and hateful in tone, overlook the simple premise that Nietzsche’s intention himself was not to create a system of objective truth himself. Because, as he postulates in Beyond Good and Evil: “In the womb of being, rather, in the intransitory, in the hidden god, in the ‘thing in itself’ – that is where their cause must lie and nowhere else! – This mode of judgement constitutes the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this mode of evaluation stands in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this their ‘faith’ that they concern themselves with their ‘knowledge’, with something that is at last solemnly baptized ‘the truth’” (1973, 34). As such, the creation of truth, upon which grounds Nietzsche was sorely condemned for throughout the 20^th century, was not Nietzsche’s central desire – indeed, the establishment of a particular truth ignores Nietzsche’s attempts to negate the this preoccupation with “truth” and “reality” present in the mind of the “metaphysician” and the abstract philosopher. The existentialist is not concerned about abstractions, but instead he is concerned about the establishment of productive myths. In this respect, the “reality” of reality TV (at least where participants and audience are volunteers) is real and, dependent upon how greatly you herald such issues as personal autonomy cannot be anything but a moral, voluntary exchange.

Marxism and the streams of thinkers that have come to be associated with Marxism tend to think very differently about the self. Socialist philosophy suggests that the human freedoms posited by the American and British administrations during their “free” market experiments are merely a chimera designed to obfuscate and paper over the exploitative system of exchange that operates between rich and poor.

Contrary to existentialism, Marxists suggest that voluntary participants (in such things as reality TV) have to adhere to some greater moral code, because the dynamic of exchange exposes basic human vulnerabilities that exist in everybody. Their concept of reality is based upon a politics of exploitation, or a dialectical exchange between two opposing factions, one of which is exploited, and the other is dominant. Such Marxist theory can be used to explore this notion of “reality” in reality TV further: the dynamic between rich and poor (used in “crude” or traditional Marxism) creates a system of exploitation between the working class and the ruling class. This can be extended into linguistics and semantic theory, and forms the central tenet of deconstructionist theory posited by Jacques Derrida. Derrida argues firstly that the structuralist theories of Ferdinand de Saussure depended upon a relationship between the signifier and the signified – namely, what is being represented and what it represents. While Saussure argued that this framework was stable, and that the signifier and the signified never changed, Derrida and the deconstructionist theorists argued that the relationship between the signifier and the signified was always subject to “play” and fluctuated constantly. Moreover, the limitations of human communication meant that our perception of the world was limited. Derrida argues that the world is conveyed in language and discourse. Derrida takes this further, arguing that Western language has always based its functionality upon what he calls “binary oppositions”, in which one is seen as inferior, while the other is seen as superior. These oppositions run the gamut of human thinking and is what abstract philosophy tends to ignore: for instance, the dichotomy between man and woman is the subject of many feminist writers: while man can give women the same material rights, linguistically, woman still represents the absence of masculinity. Similarly, reality is seen as superior to the simulacrum, as explored by Plato’s myth of the cave, in which he argues that one pure object exists, and that everything else is a copy, and therefore inferior to the real thing. Derrida argues that deconstruction provides a solution to this problem, and by exposing and making conscious these oppositions, and deliberately working against them creates a system of simultaneous difference and equality through semantic “play”.

As such, the ethical concept or exchange between the directors of reality TV, the participants and the audience create an interesting dynamic of exploitation that tends to eschew simple ethical thinking. To say that these reality programmes are bad ethically (a string of reasons have been posited, from the sensory deprivation of participants, to the unsavoury and voyeuristic nature of the program, to the use of the grotesque, to the implementation of torture techniques) avoids the overall issue that participation is “voluntary”. However, the previous arguments (deconstructive, Marxist, feminist, existential) all have radically different arguments as to what exactly constitutes “voluntary”; the notion of voluntary participation is a key issue in philosophical debate, and can be seen to surface in the ethics of advertising, fast food consumption and the selling of junk to young people. The question revolves around the concept of “reality”; namely, whether we are in control or whether our choices are determined by mechanisms and structures of power, addiction, and deep psychological needs. Reality TV argues that it exists as a form of entertainment. In the following section I will look at the dynamic of exploitation; particularly upon how reality TV exploits certain human qualities or “realities”, and renders them perverse.

Reality TV: a psychoanalytical approach

Reality TV, especially the phenomenon of the game show Reality TV programme, namely such programmes as Big Brother, Survivor, Big Diet, Celebrity Fat Club, Temptation Island, Bachelorette and Boot Camp exploit numerous psychoanalytical desires in order to “hystericise” reality and to render ordinary impulses and desires perverse. This exploitation, which I will argue is central to the strategy of corporatism and central to the postmodern malaise raises a number of ethical questions concerning the position of Reality TV in contemporary society, is endemic in the phenomenon of reality TV, and appears concerned primarily as either a reflection of, or a creation of, many issues that plague Western consciousness. Reality TV attacks certain concepts and, via gossip columns and TV journalism in other media, makes these things hysterical. One such topic is that of the “normal” relationship. While Big Brother tends to vet the participants based upon their position as sexually “perverse” (the last series of Big Brother featured a transsexual and several homosexuals) eccentric or colourful in order to engender conflict within the house and to maximize the entertainment value that can be derived from this “reality” that is constructed, the vision of the ordinary relationship, which occurs with relative frequency in the Big Brother house, is one that is treated with extreme shock by both participants, media, the programme makers, and eventually, the audience themselves. Jan Jagodozinki (2003) comments that “each reality game ‘hot-houses’ and hystericizes ‘normal relationships’, engendering paranoid perception where no one is to be trusted” (323). Of course, ethically this hystericisation serves the purpose many mass-mediated and televised spectacles seek to achieve. In a Marxist, postmodernist context, the media (especially the ‘modern’ mediums of television and brand advertising) wishes to engender a consumer whose only relationship to the outside world is through the corporatist-owned signification of signs. We are marketed towards in order to create an atomised, pseudo-individual whose only relationship to him / her self is through signification and engagement with the hyperreal. As such, consumer need is created, manufactured in the dream factory of advertising, and disseminated through mass media to create demand for a product that was, prior to the embellishment of reality through hyperrealistic signification, useless and unnecessary. Reality TV simply contributes to this feeling of post-human disgust with the mechanisms of the body and the unconscious mind. For instance, the drives expounded by Freud (labelled by him as genital, oral and anal), are attacked with frequency in a number of these TV reality shows: In Big Brother, participants are deprived of food, and are occasionally “treated” to products from the outside world when they participate in a particular task (the oral, anal dichotomy). The lack of privacy in toilets suggest the programmes obsession with these excretive functions; also, the relationships that occur among these “ordinary” people are exaggerated with an unparalleled degree of disgust and hysteria both within the programme and external to it in other “gossip” columns and TV magazines. This suggests an obsession with the genital drives that are echoed in other reality TV programmes. The hystericisation of normality “are the very symptoms that plague the American landscape, namely the preoccupation with the excesses of the drives – anal and oral (food / dieting) […], genital (seduction) […] trust, […] extreme physical exertion […] authority” (Jagodozinki 2003, 323). These drives are isolated and compounded in a manner that many would figure as unethical; the audiences watch the TV – voyeurs in their living rooms – rendering all these desires perverse and alien. The anal / oral functioning can be seen in all manner of these game show / reality TV hybrids. In Survivor, participants experience food deprivation, then are force-fed the junk food of capitalism. Reality TV provides us with either a perverse kind of promotion of these desires, or else exaggerates and satirizes these principles that already play a huge part in the advertising, producer / consumer relationship of (most of) Western society. For instance, many of these reality TV programmes are obsessed with food and excrement, the balance between which is, of course, expressed in terms of physical weight: Game show reality programmes such as Fat Club, Big Diet, Survivor and Big Brother, as well as innumerable documentaries, talk shows (Gerry Springer, Rikki Lake, Oprah Winfrey all tend to devote a disproportionate amount of time to “exposing” obesity in ways that carefully tread the dual lines of exploitation and grotesquery, and non-pervasive exploration or passive “documentary”, often with a focus on the former) all focus on weight, eating and consumption as a mainstay of their challenges. In one edition of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, pop-mystic and spoon bender Uri Geller was forced to eat live slugs while some other minor celebrity spent most of the programme complaining about his constipation. As such, natural processes such as eating, drinking and excreting matter becomes exaggerated to such an extent that these very bodily processes become shameful. Jagodozinki comments that “Survivor players are foced to follow exactly the same starve and binge mentality of bulemics” (2003, 321). The Freudian drives and impulses are concentrated upon by programme makers in order to engender an interest in the programme that, if it were a representation of ordinary, mundane “reality”, would presumably be too scant to provoke widespread interest.

Similarly, other drives are obsessed over. The genital desires, marked by an obsession with sex, lust and seduction are exploited through programmes such as Big Brother, Temptation Island and Bachelorette, where sexual, relationship related trysts are exploited by the programme makers in order to maximise audience ratings and profits from their programme. For instance, whenever a relationship threatens to bubble over in Big Brother, the programme makers, along with the media vehicles that feature Big Brother (showbiz magazines and tabloid newspapers, for instance) tend to simultaneously glorify and pervert the developing relationship into a grotesque and abominable spectacle.

Trust and paranoiac fantasies are also played with in the post-production of Big Brother. The format is automatically designed to expose hypocrisy: while participants are forced to work together and live together, participants also have to periodically vote each other out of the house. As such, issues of trust and paranoiac functions are exploited, in a microcosm, of the contemporary world that constitutes “reality” TV.

As such, the difficulty with exposing the ethical indiscretion of reality TV is simply that it can either be seen as a hyperbolic reflection or satire of current prevalent trends in Western society, or that it can be seen as contributing to the effects of “consumerisation”, and can therefore be seen in the light of Marxists who approach the exploitative mechanisms of mass media with grave suspicion. Louis Althusser’s system of “interpolation” which in his words, is described as having the following relationship with ideology: “ideology interpolates the individual as subject, […] this interpolation "is realized in institutions, in their rituals and practices” (2001). As such, the ideology of guilt, of loathing for the body and of the consumerisation of the general public through the exploitation of these particular vulnerabilities is, according to Althusser, interpolated and disseminated through mass media, or, as he calls it, the “ideological state apparatus”. And any form of mass media that adheres to these capitalist desires against the individual and for the “subject” is also catering to systematic oppression to the masses and is therefore morally reprehensible.

So, what is the argument in favour of reality TV? Namely, that it bypasses these ideologies and instead presents us with a “reality” of ordinary people, unencumbered by the traffic of biased representation one tends to get in drama and fiction. The function of reality TV, according to this argument, is to present to people life as it really is. I would argue, however, that this is not the case for a number of reasons. The psychological stresses that subjects are put under are, in themselves, unique in these game show / reality TV programmes. It would be extraordinary to presume that everyday people would be forced to endure these psychological strains. Moreover, the dissemination and the editing of these pieces together serves a dual function: firstly, it imposes a strict narrative upon the happenings based upon a desire to entertain. Entertainment can be achieved through the exploitation and exaggerations of these specific, Freudian functions. In order to condense 24 hours of time into half an hour, programme makers have to edit the raw material of “reality” in a way that generates interest in the overall product. The effect of this is to highlight these desires and dramas and to generate a narrative of disgust from the raw material. As such, events are scandalised, hystericised, and processed through the “state apparatus” of Freudian drama. This is satirised in the film The Truman Show. Jagodozinki (2003) comments that “The banality of his everyday life with its mundane repetitions is the very opposite of media hype which happens off camera or is worked in ‘live’” (328). The function of this segment is to highlight the principle that these dramas are not reality; simply because the subject is “real” and falls into the pigeonhole of “non-fiction” by programmers, the ways in which these “documentaries” are assembled tend to fall into dramatic stereotypes associated with the exploitation of Freudian impulses, checked with a Marxian system of exploitation.

The World Is Flat: “Infotainment” and relativism

Modern news programming tends to cut and splice events of widely different qualities – from serious news items about plagues, famines, death and suffering to items about cuddly toys and cats getting stranded in trees. Also, programming on commercial channels are cut every fifteen minutes with a barrage of advertising, with the effect of sharply combining the “reality” of news footage and reality TV with the “non-reality” of advertising. Ethically, this places TV in general under the accusation of numbing the viewer and transforming him or her into the amoral, relativistic, emotionally numb and philosophically nihilistic consumer infant that sociopaths and corporations tend to prefer. As such, arguments about the “reality” of reality TV being less produced than fiction tends to falter - instead, the handle of “reality” has the effect of simply lowering the viewer’s (or consumer’s) guard. The juxtaposition of mundane events in a fast barrage of creative editing sensationalises the mundane. In a triumph of style over content, some reality TV shows and news features use music and montage to create the illusion of event, when there is no event to speak of. “Real life” documentaries and long-running reality TV programmes, such as Changing Rooms and DIY SOS utilise quirky (and somewhat insipid) montage sequences with humorous music in order to generate a homely, friendly appeal. However, almost all reality TV programmes appeal to consumerist desires (an endless procession of programmes about house hunting, gardening, buying), or exploitative voyeurism (house cleaning programmes about “dirty” people, unsympathetic obesity programmes, a fixation upon sexual or cosmetic acts). Ethically, reality TV however, only serves to echo the general “cut up” of television and film in itself, and this process of desensitisation that pacifies the audience cannot singularly be put down to the phenomenon of “infotainment” and reality TV. For instance, one only has to watch a zombie film such as Dawn of the Dead to realise that film tends to desensitize us (at least temporarily) to mindless acts of carnal violence.

So, from the Marxist point of view, which tends to undermine the autonomy of the citizen and his ability to choose whether or not he or she is subjected to reality TV, the harmful effects of this type of programming is multivalent. Whether the audience is treated as subject or object determines in many ways the ethical implications of reality programming. Also, while most subjects in reality TV are voluntary participants, they are also making themselves subjects. While the existential argument would suggest that choice is possible providing people actually want it, Marxists would stress that people are under considerably more control than they think, and that, while these concepts of “reality”, “autonomy”, “control” and “freedom” are used in television, advertising, political and economic ideology, exploitation will continue to occur and people will continue to operate as automated, atomised slaves in a consumer market.

Reality TV, along with other forms of television, has a tendency to level out and flatten the initial impact of certain programmes. As such, even if we look at the impact of a reality TV programme in its most positive way (i.e. that it does “inform and educate” the audience, to use a Reithian term), the process by which it is disseminated to the public, is repeated and repeated, engendering the effect of normalisation and quelling genuinely progressive, subversive or challenging elements, and punctuating the programme with advertising has the effect of “dumbing down” the audience, subjugating the intended audience. Looked at from this context, ideology is present in all TV and film-related material. The ideology is embedded within the very production and the context of TV; its numbing effect essentially produces a desensitized, passive consumer droid. As such, regardless of the programming, TV itself has an innate, deep effect of pacifying the audience, which absolves “reality” TV of its ethical reprehensibility in favour of condemning the entire process as flattening and cheapening human desire by whitewashing the emotional and moral impacts of devastation, war and human misery. One such example of “infotainment” was the “news bunny” on the ill-fated Live TV, which served almost as a satire of conventional news footage, stripping the desensitising effects of news footage bare. During reportage of an earthquake in Bangladesh, news bunny shook around in cartoon simulation of the effects. This generated scandal at the time; however, the effects of this were merely to satirize what is already there. Other, albeit more sophisticated satires of news programming such as Brass Eye and The Day Today create a kind of self-conscious satire of hyperreal news; editing is used to ridicule and sensationalise false events. The paedophile special of Brass Eye generated an incredible amount of scandal afterwards, namely because it exposed the ways in which infotainment, reality TV and tabloid journalism conspire together in order to generate an ideology of contempt and exaggerated inhumanity toward these sexual criminals. Similarly, the drugs episode of Brass Eye satirises reality TV by generating a campaign directed towards the banning of “cake”, which was described by Noel Edmonds as the following: “the worst thing about cake is that it is a made up drug.” Brass Eye is a postmodern attempt to satirize and deconstruct the processes of “reality” TV, presenting a self-conscious exposé of how reality TV works to generate particular ideologies of consumerisation and how it levels and desensitizes through the post-production process of editing and cut-up. The camerawork and the graphical elements of Brass Eye are deliberately pompous, elaborate and exaggerated. The opening sequence juxtaposes Noel Gallagher, a nuclear explosion and a chat show parody in the same frame. The effects expose the truth behind visions of “reality” on television. Indeed, the procession of elaborate editing, the made up statistics, such as bar charts that feature “good” and “bad”, highlight that the processes by which television operates work against truth, and “reality” is not a necessary component of “reality” TV.

The desensitization process of reality TV, in Marxist terms, transforms people into hapless subjects. They are classified as subjects through the exploitation of certain systems of editing, and the juxtaposition of events in bite-sized segments has the effect of levelling any emotional attachment one might have with the characters presented. The very fact that reality TV is designed suggests that what is being presented is not reality at all; moreover, it is an ideologically constructed ethical universe that promotes and echoes the current status quo. Whether this process of systematic derogation and subjectification of the human individual through the process of “interpolation”, coupled with the psychological harm of atomisation, infantilisation and the rendering perverse of adult processes is harmful in itself, or merely offers a passive projection of the dichotomy between the televised object and the subject that absorbs it is dependent upon which particular paradigm one wishes to observe the phenomenon of reality TV from. Either way, reality TV can be said to echo the general complaint about mass media in general. Philosophers lament the loss of the real, whereas Marxists tend to refer to the “pacifying”, “levelling” subject that ideology and mass media promotes as truth. A close reading of the reality TV programme Big Brother will hopefully highlight many of the ways in which reality TV signals a development of the postmodern malaise; and will expose the problematic of getting a single, worthwhile answer regarding the complex and self-reflexive dynamic of post-modernism.

“The ground zero of the cool hunt”: Branding and reality TV.

Commercial television is interrelated to advertising; it is funded exclusively by advertisers and, as such, it would be naïve to presuppose that television programmes have any other purpose than to fill the gaps between adverts and to prevent viewing figures from collapsing under the weight of delivering commercial messages. Commercial TV, as such, is merely an arm of the corporate advertising and branding industry, whose ethical model is far from the purity and selflessness it tends to promote directly in its advertising. As such, an analysis of “reality” TV can be seen as directly correlative to the ever more intrusive methods advertisers are beginning to impose in order to sell products. This self-reflexivity has been developed by brands that have become more aware of the pessimism towards big brand advertising among the advertising industry’s “subjects”. Naomi Klein (2000) suggests that marketing has shifted abruptly following “Marlboro Friday”, where Marlboro was forced to slash the price of its cigarettes by over 20% as a result of competition from no-brand names. This suggested that the brand and advertising in general was no longer effective. However, the shift from advertising a product to generating a “transparent”, corporate culture that infiltrated the very core of the company ethos was the genuine result of Marlboro Friday. As a result, brands began to strike back at “reality”, generating an entire corporate culture and “philosophy” geared towards engineering reality in a similarly postmodern way to how reality TV tends to function: “These companies didn't wear their image like a cheap shirt - their image was so integrated with their business that other people wore it as their shirt” (Klein 2000, 24). Ethically, the revolution in marketing in the 1990s did not create genuinely transparent companies, whose ethical policy worked in a less exploitative manner. Instead, these companies became more intrusive: instead of merely projecting a given lifestyle, these companies instead dominated the whole reality machine, and consumers and workers were pacified to an ever greater extent. The development of “reality” TV certainly epitomises this encroachment of a faked, commodified version of “reality” onto their products. Despite the fact, for instance, that Nike asked the famous anti-corporatist Ralph Nader to talk for two minutes on a Nike advert about how terrible the Nike brand was, the overall product being offered was still an advert for a brand logo. In essence, what Klein argues is the “ground zero of the cool hunt” (2000, 136) where anti-corporatist models converged with corporatist models in an attempt to make branded goods “hip”. The deeply postmodern spectacle of a Sprite advertisement calling for an end to branding, a Diesel advert gratuitously displaying the sweatshop labour conditions has been successful in quelling or rendering the exchange barrier between anti-corporatist, anti-globalisation models of “reality” impossible. The ethics are in the dynamics of the “impossible exchange”, in which “brands” themselves become brands, regardless of the principle of branding operated. Reality TV does not, therefore offer a simple, crude “distortion” of reality. Instead, like the self-reflexive brand, it offers a complex, dynamic signal that simultaneously distorts and creates reality in its own image. Baudrillard’s hyperreal does not create a simple obfuscation of reality – it generates reality. Therefore, reality TV can be seen in conjunction to these complex branding exercises that capitalise and utilise the innate distortion processes of branding technology to generate an “interpolated” vision of reality that invisibly disappears what proceeded it.

As such, simple comments on the ethical standard of reality TV cannot fail to produce simplified results, because, as such, reality TV exists in relation to the whole system of codification that the postmodern condition resembles. Lyotard describes discourse in the postmodern context as a “cloud of narrative meaning” (1979, 124). Simple ethical considerations are eschewed for a complex network of meaning that exists under the banner of corporatism. Because postmodernity has reduced the previously concrete moral considerations of “good” and “bad”, highlighted under the banner of the “modernist project”, ethics can now no longer be considered in such a simplistic light. For instance, consideration about the ethics of reality TV has to be concerned about the relative autonomy of the individual; it has to be concerned about whether reality TV functions as a voluntary discourse for willing participants, and has to look at whether reality TV represents the origin of a particular ethical view. Because reality TV is dependent and reflexive of advertising strategies to boost ratings in order to maximise the numbers being subjected to their brands, does the origin of ethical considerations really begin with the program, or does this generation / obfuscation of reality really begin with the brands, the television stations, narrative discourse itself, or the postmodern condition in particular? Ethics and postmodernity presumes that a certain being or entity provides the crux for the development of a particular ethical style. Simply because reality TV exploits people, pacifies audiences and makes voyeurs and perverts of us does not necessarily connote that reality TV is unethical, because ethics and values themselves are generated and modified by institutions; for example, “murder” is wrong unless it is deemed correct by a government, brand or corporate interest and is labelled “war”. “Terrorism” is wrong unless the terrorism being advocated is openly sponsored by government institutions, in which case it is generally called “freedom fighting”. Drugs are harmful unless they are administered by a doctor, in which case they are miraculous. “Aggressive begging” by the homeless is wrong unless it is marketed in the mainstream and called “door-to-door selling”. “Advertising” under regimes that fall outside of the ideological parameters of a Western world is called “propaganda”. The ethics of a given scenario is tainted by the larger model under which it operates. While reality TV is modelled as “reality” and is considered a part of the television schedules, it will always be considered “ethical” regardless of the extent to which exploitation and cruelty occurs within it. As such, the uncovering of the “true” ethics of reality TV is that it constitutes a general obedience towards a greater model which in turn generates systems of ethics, “common sense” and notions of “right” and “wrong”.

The deliberate sensationalism of ordinary lives in reality TV can be said to echo the developments of brands towards a model where the advertisement content and what is contained within the product interweave with a greater subtlety and complexity. For instance, Diesel adverts, which promote sweatshop labour, global apocalypse as a result of corporatist greed, war and murder does not consider the “ethics” of production in a traditional way. Indeed, its part in a network based upon the unscrupulous acquisition of money entails that ethical concerns simply need not be considered. In fact, in a climate where wealth has been substituted for supposed ethical behaviour, these advertisements can even be seen as a good thing – an ultimate adherence to the neo-capitalist model of free trade… the promotion of the “free” way of life supported by politicians. Reality TV also exists in communion with this development of self-reflexivity and deliberately eschewing simple meaning in an attempt to create a deeply set memory for a certain brand among certain key individuals. While reality TV is as much a reflection of reality as a work of fiction would be, its position within the grey area of “reality” and “non-reality” positions it firmly in the complex ethical terrain that advertising and the so-called transparency of branding tends to also offer. Of course, the main difficulty constitutes locating precisely how the reality TV product generates funds through the exploitation of constructed needs (it is common parlance that the final round of Big Brother had more votes than the last general election). Indeed, the problems and ethical concerns of reality TV, if they are to be seen as problems at all, can be extended to the entire system of capitalism – the obfuscation of truth, the generation of a faux-transparency that “exposes” reality, the supposed distinction between “voluntary” and “forced” decisions and the difficulty that exists between “generating” reality and “reflecting” reality are all exposed in an ethical consideration of “reality” TV. In this final section, I will look specifically at the TV programme Big Brother, highlighting specifically the ethical concerns and controversies of this particular programme.

“Big Brother”: a closer analysis

For Channel 4, the programme Big Brother has been a hugely profitable enterprise, and has presumably allowed funding for less profitable ventures such as serious documentaries, investigative journalism, and more “high brow” expensive programming that would otherwise be beyond the financial range of the station. As such, Big Brother and the ethical dynamic of exploitation between the producers, the marketers, the audience and the players all have to be weighed up to the possible profits it makes to allow for more dynamic, less profit-oriented programming. The advertising for Big Brother is extremely intrusive – it is heavily advertised and is the central focus of other media institutions for weeks during its inception. As such, does the “voluntary” nature of the program, its position as “entertainment”, the inclusion of faux-educational psychological analyses of the contestants and the relative absence of branding in the program outweigh the cruelty that is exacted upon the participants.

The voting system in Big Brother suggests exactly what the programme is about – it is, first and foremost, a machine designed to make money. In fact, audiences cast their votes in their thousands. The mechanics behind this system are ethically dubious. While on the one hand, it could be seen that votes cast are voluntary votes, the enormous amount of marketing that is ploughed into casting a vote must inevitably coerce people to part with their money. It can be argued that the money made from this franchise can be used to make less profitable, more education programmes. However, this does not excuse the fact that money is exchanged in a dynamic of coercion and psychological need. Indeed, the efficacy of a voting system that charges money for no reward is astonishing in its own right… because the psychological, blanket saturation of Big Brother and the characters therein invest so much psychological impact upon the viewers, they are actually more willing to part with their cash and cast a vote than they are willing to vote for free in general elections. Ethically, the popularity of this method has to be concerned about a number of factors: firstly, does the Big Brother voting system coerce or merely offer viewers with a choice? Second, providing that an element of coercion does exist, does reality TV make any further ethical compromise than capitalism does in general? The first point, as I have discussed in detail, depends heavily upon the largely homologous presupposition that audiences are either free-thinking or passive, sponge-like drones. Both have their supporters; it is fair to assume that both arguments have their validity. The second point is that, if we assume that there is a degree of coercion involved in the acquisition of votes from audiences, does this cross any particular ethical boundary? I would argue that, relative to the attacks on public space, the development of ever more intrusive advertising campaigns and more sophisticated ways of making us part with our cash in an increasingly virtual and constructed exchange of signs, that this voting mechanism does not really push the marketing drive out into new directions, although the complete absence of an end-product for the consumer, other than perhaps a feeling of belonging or participation in the overall spectacle of the Big Brother house may constitute a growing trend in the illusion of participation. As such, this element of reality TV cannot really be said to constitute something particular to Reality TV and, as such, cannot really be seen as an ethical consideration exclusive to Reality TV either. Moreover, a consideration of the imposition of the created need to participate in the incorporated miasma can be extended to a multivalence of corporate strategies. The same ethical argument can be extended, to various degrees, to Disneyworld, to aggressive branding to promote polarities between haves and have-nots in logo-adorned sportswear, and even to the aggressive use of starving children in charity advertisements. While all of these can be argued as systems that transform the individual into consumer or subject, the introduction of voting systems cannot singularly constitute ethical outrage in reality TV. Moreover, the eventual location of the money can be considered in an argument. If monies being used were being invested in propagating war or in further promoting the aggressive destruction of the environment and furthering the exploitation of sweatshop workers, then ethical considerations would be tantamount to this process. However, Channel 4 does not do this – indeed, money is merely invested in further programming. While the worst that may happen is the production of more “audience participation” in order to generate more wealth, ethical considerations remain small in comparison to the greater sins of capitalism and therefore, deserve to be considered in a critique of the entire network of capitalism rather than a consideration of the ethics of reality TV.

How Reality TV is unique is in the ways in which it hystericises the real and atomises the individual in ways that remove certain boundaries between the audience and the spectator. Big Brother is frequently referred to as an example of voyeurism – audiences watch entirely normal events unfold in a manner akin to reading a diary or a gossip column in a newspaper. Indeed, it is evident from the degree to which showbiz magazines such as Heat and tabloid gossip columns have fetishized the Big Brother phenomenon. In many ways it represents precisely what is endemic in our age – namely, the cult of celebrity and the projection of inner desires onto a vacuous celebrity culture. While this postmodern technique of fantasy creation was developed in the 1960s in Andy Warhol’s “five minutes of fame” experiments, the sheer ordinariness of the participants pushes this spectacle out further. While it is frequently commented that the cult of the celebrity has created an array of empty-headed stars and starlets whose only reason for fame is that they are famous, it is often the case (at the very least) that celebrities turn up to the right parties, network efficiently and perhaps appear in a scandal or two. Big Brother, however, takes this one step further – the only reason for the (usually short lived) fame of the contestants is simply that they have been selected for participation in the programme. What is truly postmodern about Big Brother is that participants don’t even have any connection to the celebrity world. Like The Truman Show, their only appeal is their sheer, utter ordinariness. The creation of these temporary celebrities out of nothing creates a scenario of projection that further undermines the autonomy of the audience. Via some surrogated, projected feeling of wanting to be recognised, the audience watch passively. As their own, ordinary lives are ignored, they create figures in the “everymen” that flaunt about on the screen. While this feeling has been exploited for generations by writers obsessed with capturing the real, what is truly radical about this postmodern phenomenon is that the fictional content has been eroded to the point that only post-production and the extraordinary situation that the participants are embroiled in can constitute a spectacle upon which the audience can project upon. Of course this develops the notion that audiences are pacified. However, can this be regarded as ethically solid? Certainly, television has a direct impact upon certain members of society. It is simply not enough to dispel the ethical considerations of television by offering the traditional neo-conservative argument that people make their own autonomous decisions in life. If this were true, then why do advertisers spend billions of dollars trying to coerce people into spending their money? The same argument has been used by the fast food industry in recent lawsuits from obese people. They argue that they merely supply a demand. However, it is also obvious that they create a need as well. Therefore, if reality TV creates a need among certain portions of its audience, does the cruelty exacted upon the contestants also contribute to the creation of a society of cruelty? Reality TV, especially the game show element, is edited in conjunction with its need to render extraordinary the (largely) ordinary lives of the contestants. While there is nothing artistically or philosophically significant about the Big Brother contestants, the hysterical nature by which the programme is edited together and promoted in secondary material actually serves to alienate and atomise the individual who is watching the programme; there is a frustrating dynamic between the passive subject in the house and the passive subject that watches, wishing that he too could live by those rules. The popularity of the program could in many ways be attributed to this projection of desired authority. In the postmodern age, under the ever-present glare of “freedom”, “liberty”, “free trade” and “being who you want to be”, the desire for order and rules remains intact. Perhaps the popularity of the Big Brother franchise is precisely because the characters in the Big Brother house live an extremely restrictive life. Their food is rationed, their orders are generated and told by Big Brother himself. Existentially, it signifies the secret lack of desire audiences have for freedom, and allows contestants to escape into the safe, controlled world of the Big Brother house. From this context then, Big Brother isn’t merely morally neutral, but it is actually morally positive, allowing viewers to escape from their freedom in their droves.

What ethical implications do the orders imposed upon contestants in Reality TV have? In Big Brother, contestants are forced to undergo ritualistic humiliation for food and for luxuries such as cigarettes and alcoholic beverages. While liberal scholars suggest that the rules placed upon contestants are morally contemptible, and that conditions in the house emulate those of concentration camps and detention centres – while it has been commented that many of the contestants display psychological signs of depression – we have to consider that the contestants (aside from those in its first instance – should be perfectly aware of the conditions that they will be put under. In fact, it is testament to the efficacy of post-production techniques in making the Big Brother experience exciting that so many people apply to participate in the agony of staying in a house under total surveillance in a state of sensory deprivation for several weeks. Indeed, it exposes the rift between the “reality” that is presented in the televised version of Big Brother and the actual reality that (presumably) the Big Brother experience constitutes. The difficulty in broaching these two concepts may prove misleading and ethically reprehensible; certainly many of the participants regret their decisions to participate, notably scholar and popular feminist Germaine Greer, who said that it was one of the worst experiences of her entire life. While participants choose to apply for Big Brother for a number of reasons, certainly the hype behind the mundane reality coupled with the illusion of fame afterwards constitutes one of the main reasons. While Big Brother contestants undergo psychological tests beforehand, the dubiousness of these tests, especially when coupled with the desire to create a spectacle and a scandal tend to work against each other. It is entirely possible that the development of reality TV will eventually be exaggerated in a need to create ever greater scandal. How long before psychiatric patients are put into a room together to fight it out to the death? How long before participants are strapped into torture devices for non-conformance to house rules? Unfortunately, the desire for television companies and for capitalism to include ever greater amounts of shock into their programming has created a scenario of moral and ethical reprehensibility that seemingly will stop at nothing. As volunteers high on the desire to get famous will apply or undergo any humiliating act (The Word being a seminal example of this technique), perhaps it is only a matter of time before reality TV gets more macabre.

A Future for Reality TV?

Ethical considerations in reality TV have to look at the deeper dynamics and structures of television, marketing and capitalism in general, as the two cannot possibly be extricated from one-another. As television can be said to be chiefly motivated by a desire to appeal to advertisers rather than consumers, the existence of a deregulated market may create an ever greater need to flaunt ethical and moral considerations. While it can be argued that a supply and demand situation empowers the viewer, there will always be vulnerable members of society that are willing to get exploited and condemned by the populous for money or fame. Can, and should Reality TV explore these considerations? Is Reality TV merely a by-product of a society that has bypassed morality and ethical behaviour in favour of exploiting and condemning its less fortunate citizens, or can it itself impose self-regulation and change the dynamics of television? Personally, I would argue the former. It is extremely unlikely in a deregulated market that wholly profits from the capitalism of shock (the scandal involving Jade and Big Brother testifies to this) will create a less exploitative model. Also, further deregulation via the Internet may provide greater options for those willing to create ever more exploitative programming scenarios. Also, the increasing importance of digital television in the future will have a dual effect on programming. Firstly, deregul