Jack_ |
15-04-2013 11:28 PM |
I had to write an essay a few weeks back on whether postmodern media has blurred the boundary between reality and representation and wrote a massive opening paragraph on Big Brother and included some examples of twists :p my knowledge of the show was quite useful
I'd start off by saying how Big Brother brought about and defined the new genre of 'reality TV' and prying into people's lives and it went from a social experiment into a heightened environment with producer manipulated twists, and the format led to other similar reality shows...set in a jungle, on an island...and then the idea of watching people was taken into hometowns and cities (TOWIE, MIC etc) but it was no longer really 'reality' because a lot of it was set up and engineered (as was Big Brother in its later years), and now you've got reality shows about people's sex lives, 'embarrassing' bodies, how they do their house up, hoarding, live shows about people's experiences of struggling to get their kids to bed, subcultures (gypsies, prisoners etc). We've become obsessed with watching people live their lives and all the weird little things that go on in them, Channel 4 are particularly bad (or good, whichever way you see it) for these kind of shows.
Also maybe mention how when Big Brother started, you could get 15 minutes of fame from a reality show, and normal people became minor celebrities for a short space of time, but now the tables have turned and a lot of the reality shows are focused on existing celebrities, so those shows that follow around people like Katie Price and Peter Andre and are meant to portray their actual lives when really it's just a condensed version of what they want you to see which isn't really 'reality' at all.
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