Full Description
This collection of scholarly essays examines reality television. The first show, Survivor, inspired a national craze when it aired in the summer of 2000. Ever since, successors and copycats have been on each of the four largest networks. The basics stay the same: put a group of people into situations bound to cause conflict, and watch them squirm.
Rather than criticize the series' voyeuristic appeal, this work evaluates what goes on within the text of such shows and how they reflect or affect our larger culture. Contributors include researchers from communications, sociology, political science, and psychology. The contributions cover such topics as reality television's relationships with cultural identity, publicity rights, historical perspectives, trust, decision-making strategies, political rationality, office politics, and primitivism. Each chapter includes a bibliography.
Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction: Culture, Communication, and Community Revealed in and through Reality Television
PART I. LESSONS ABOUT REALITY
1. Individual and Cultural Identity in the World of Reality Television
2. Contrived Television Reality: Survivor as a Pseudo-event
3. Who Owns Your Personality: Reality Television and Publicity Rights
4. From Dragnet to Survivor: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Reality Television
PART II. LESSONS ABOUT PLAYING SOCIAL GAMES
5. Reel Life: The Social Geometry of Reality Shows
6. The Nonverbal Communication of Trustworthiness: A Necessary Survivor Skill
7. Metaphors of Survival: A Textual Analysis of the Decision-Making Strategies of the Survivor Contestants
8. Survivor, Social Choice, and the Impediments to Political Rationality: Reality TV as Social Science Experiment
PART III. LESSONS BEYOND THE LENS
9. Mutual Metaphors of Survivor and Office Politics: Images of Work in Popular Survivor Criticism
10. Self-Help for Savages: The "Other" Survivor, Primitivism, and the Construction of American Identity
11. The Communication Ethics of Survivor
12. Traveling the Terrain of Screened Realities: Our Reality, Our Television
Contributors
Index
