Introduction
In the last few decades, the media has experienced a dramatic shift from fictitious and manufactured entertainment to rampant interest for insight into the lives of real people. Hence, modern media has been overrun by a rise in popularity and variety of reality television shows. However, reality television may in fact be just a manufactured presentation of “reality” rather than truly representative of reality itself. Is reality television just blatant fiction behind a ruse of honesty and actuality? Between the deceptive and exploitative start of reality television and the continued practice of privacy invasion in current reality tv, one can wonder about the truth of what goes on behind the scenes. Along the same lines, do viewers already subconsciously know that there may be little to no reality in these productions, and if so, what becomes of the attraction to reality tv? This paper will explore the history of reality tv, boundary lines and exploitation, reality tv effects on society, and current reality tv and legal boundaries to determine the realness and truth behind reality television production.
History of Reality TV
The first concept of reality television in the media introduced to the world was Candid Camera. Candid Camera was an extremely popular and long-running reality television series that featured covert recording practices in service of media entertainment. The show was first aired as a radio special in June of 1947 before transitioning to television the following year. Allen Funt produced the television series and hosted it himself for the first decade of its popularity before passing the torch to his son, Peter Funt. The show filmed ordinary people in secret, putting them into planned and unusual situations to catch real-time reactions. Because of the show’s simplicity, it was easily varied to create endless scenarios. Only when the joke was revealed would a host announce, “Smile, you're on Candid Camera!” which has become a household catchphrase to joke around and play pranks. Candid Camera was hosted mainly by the Funt’s; however, many co-hosts who came to the show left soon after and reported their distaste for Funt’s methods in their resignation (Kavka, 2012). In a similar feeling, Allen Funt expressed his regret for featuring the hosts, Dom Deleuze and Eva LaRue, who took over the show after his retirement. In his bibliography, Candidly, Allen Funt, he stated that he believed they did not understand the spirit of the show and weakened the prompts chosen to air (Reed, 1994).
Funt was one of numerous documentarians in the time period who used the wire recorder portably to capture real voices, but he was the first to think of concealing it as a means to produce audio clips candidly as media commodities. Researchers who analyzed Funt’s work in years since its production claim that he created a new genre of television with the show and foresaw the possibility of a channel for “mediatized observation” (Kavka, 2012. Yesil, 2001). This started the beginning stages of concealed motives and hidden production. The rise in the public’s fascination with the idea of concealable recording equipment in the 1940s was connected to the concern that Russian spies were infiltrating the United States during the Cold War. During the same era, The Gripe Booth grew in popularity as a radio show where GI’s aired their complaints about the Cold War. Funt was intertwined in this production as well; he discovered that the men being interviewed were more likely to share personal accounts if they were unaware they were being recorded. The producers of The Gripe Booth believed everyday conversation could be dull if it was allowed to unfold at its own pace, so Funt created scenarios to see how ordinary people would react when they were unposed, unrehearsed, and completely unaware.
Continuing, Candid Camera was analyzed as a behavioral source for social experimentation. Scientists were interested in understanding the behavioral motivations of human subjects in an unstable political climate during the rise of totalitarianism in the 1940s. In an interview from The Psychology of Life from 1985 with Zimbardo, Funt admitted to some doubts about the ethics of his productions; “I believe Candid Camera has educational value, but I also worry about what happens when the same type of deception or expose of human frailty is used by the wrong people” (Zimbardo, 1985, p.47). This battle with ethics continued in a collaboration of the two researchers in the Stanford prison experiment of 1971. Funt and Zimbardo gathered together ordinary people to participate as assigned guards or prisoners in the prison, begging the question: “what happens when you put good people into an evil place?” (Kavka, 2012). This fly-on-the-wall style of observation gave people the opportunity to claim their assigned roles to the extremes and recreate what they had previously seen in the media and stories. This leads to the incorporation of the magic bullet model. In this model, the communication of a message in media is assimilated to shooting a gun loaded with a ‘magic bullet’ or injecting someone with a hypodermic needle (Sparks, 2016). This model is used primarily as a means to coerce audiences to accept the variation of truth that is produced.
Boundary Lines and Exploitation
Skeggs and Wood developed a research project in which they were seeking a further understanding of the boundary lines of exploitation. Throughout this study, the researchers were intrigued by the addition of ‘so-called’ ordinary people which diversified the questions that urged political representation. Raison D’etre refers to the media industries that attempt to evoke new responses and reactions to its audiences in the interests of finding new markets (Skeggs & Wood, 2012). This concept created numerous studies in which the questions asked included: how do people construct a sense of identity? What are the consequences to the identity paths chosen? How do these choices intensify or ease social conflictions? And what is it like to build an identity in situations of social exclusion? (Skeggs & Wood, 2012). The inclusion of produced reality to media platforms are influential to audiences and build identity through visualization because these scenarios are presented as real and ‘normal.’ Within this acceptance of television as influential information, tv participants were characterized as failing and in need of transformation. Spinoza introduces the codification process as a key to understanding the relationship between audiences and text as well as the relationship between people (Deleuze, 1978). When emotion is set in the concept of this process, the emotion is connected to the idea as a cause and effect. Deleuze included the appreciation of the body in these observations saying, the body is an ensemble relationship for the higher power that is being affected (Skeggs & Wood, 2012). Through the second value configuration, reality television participants perform their value which reveals the generation of semiotics which invites viewers into modes of evaluation, influencing our evolution of self-identity.
Reality TV Production
In terms of production, Paul Lazarus conducted the Decatur study in 1945 which exemplified 800 female participants above the age of sixteen to embody the two step flow of communication. This communication style is influenced by face-to-face interpersonal encounters. In this study, it was proven that influence could be multiplied through indirect, interpersonal channels; but it was not effective in proving the media's overarching effect on the masses (Sparks, 2016). This study went on to connect with research from Kang’s own study. In this connection, “the struggle to decide whether the camera should offer reality directly or direct reality remains pertinent for discussions of reality tv” (p. 15). Kang and Kim worked with facial expression analysis and emotion recognition services to reveal the truths behind reality television. In their findings, Kang and Kim used words such as “supposedly” to undermine the reality of these productions and further their argument that the media is not presenting truthfully. They note that it is easier to detect edited moments in smaller groups like talk shows but more difficult when there are dozens of cameras at the shooting location. These extra angles are necessary because if the production team misses an important point in time, it can alter the effect that the entire episode has on its audiences.
Following the findings of Kang and Kim, the technical approach is added into the mix of production analysis. This approach found several issues with the application of computing technology such as participants generating fake emotions. Because of these false representations of emotion, production teams were reliant on editing services to alter the facial expressions and voices of those being filmed. As Turner suggested, “media production companies are now the ideological authors of their own interests, rather than those of the state,” he went on to suggest the reexamination of media’s role in questions of ideology (Skeggs & Wood, 2102). Many other researchers have recognized this switch in media deception, Sparks stated “publishers are supposed to be more reliable for true information than reality tv sources”(p. 293). Production methodology and post-production editing proved to conclude two notions; one, reality tv sources are not truthful, and two, publishers are not reliable anymore either.
Current Reality TV and Legal Boundaries
In more current news, researchers are searching for answers to their ethical questions of production. Bunton and Wyatt explore the ethics of reality tv in their analysis of what reality tv has to hide. It is important to first acknowledge the fact that privacy is not a legal right according to the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The court system has instead included the right to privacy in four areas: “intrusion, public disclosure of private embarrassing facts, false light, and misappropriation of a person’s name or image without permission” (Bunton, 2012, p43). To avoid legal difficulties, reality television producers now procure release forms for participants to sign away their rights to privacy. For example, people cannot submit clips to America's Funniest Home Videos without signing away some rights to their property. In the same sense, those who submit these videos also give up “claims for breach of contract, infliction of emotional distress, defamation, false light, common law or statutory misappropriation, invasion or other violations of any actual perpetrated right of privacy…” (Bunton, p44). The detrimental question remains, how to determine how much information shared is too much, and beyond the legality of reality television production, are there moral obligations to respect the right to privacy?
Conclusion
The contents of this paper included accounts of historical beginnings in reality television, the effects that reality television has had on the development of self, and the past and present opinions about ethics in reality production. As reality television was introduced to society in the 1940s, legal protections were not as they are now. Privacy was violated and taken without consent which was shown in edits of the video when it was aired. This was also represented in the experiments Funt continued after his time with Candid Camera, such as the Stanford prison experiments. These invasions of privacies brought about legal interruption and addition of privacy rights from the US courts. Reality television’s rapid popularity showed to be influential for the formation of self and representation in the media. The constant airing of these shows gradually overtook society’s development and jumped from hidden cameras to hidden agendas.
References
Bunton, K., & Wyatt, W. N. (2012). The ethics of reality TV : a philosophical examination. Continuum.
Deleuze, E. and Deleuze, J. 1978 ‘Giles Deleuze: Lecture Transcripts on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect’, Vol. 2006: http:/www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html.
Kang, S., Kim, D., Kim, Y. (2019). A visual-physiology multimodal system for detecting outlier behavior of participants in a reality TV show. Distributed Sensor Networks. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1550147719864886
Kavka, M. (2012). Reality TV. Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b5zz
Reed, Allen Funt with Philip (1994). Candidly, Allen Funt: A Million Smiles Later. New York: Barricade Books. ISBN 1-56980-008-1.
Skeggs, B., Wood, H. (2012). Reacting to Reality Television. Routledge. file:///Users/hannahkeane/Downloads/Skeggs%20and%20Wood%20-%20Reacting%20to%20Reality%20Television.pdf
Sparks, G. (2016). Media Effects Research. Cengage Learning. file:///Users/hannahkeane/Downloads/Sparks%20-%20Media%20effects%20Research.pdf
Taddeo, J. A., & Dvorak, K. (Eds.). (2010). The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History. University Press of Kentucky. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcnkz
Zimbardo, P. G. (1985). Psychology and life. Scott, Foresman.
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