Ordinary people on air
This book is about ordinary people and their forms of engagement with the media through participation in broadcast talk on television and radio. The presence of people known as ‘ordinary’ on air has increased substantially over the last two decades or so. This increase – the result of shifting contexts for public participation generated by a proliferation of new ‘reality’ and ‘lifestyle’ media genres, in addition to the well-established phone-in and talk show programmes, and accompanied by the development of multi-platform interactivity between old broadcast and new digital media – calls for a re-examination of the role of members of the general public on the radio and on television.
Although it is certainly the case that voices of the public have been regularly heard on air since the early days of broadcasting (Scannell and Cardiff 1991; Scannell 1996), the participation of ordinary people – that is to say, people who are neither actors nor media professionals – is now a routine and staple ingredient in the diet of TV programming on all channels, and this is giving rise to new frameworks for public participation in contemporary forms of broadcast talk. The other significant change in public participation media in recent years has been the growth of digitally mediated communication and interactivity between web-based and mobile technology and traditional radio and television broadcasting. This, too, has had an impact on frameworks of participation and interaction in broadcast output, and has shifted relationships between broadcasters, participants and audiences in quite significant ways (Holmes 2004).
In this introductory chapter, I begin with an overview of existing research into public participation broadcasting. The key concepts of expertise and lay participation, as well as the distinction between interaction and interactivity, will be presented here as a frame for subsequent discussions of participation and access relating to public involvement in broadcast media output. I will also briefly introduce the principal environments where ordinary people appear as participants on radio and TV, and outline the main analytic frameworks on which I will be drawing in my analyses of the discursive activities that structure this participation. The central question of what being an ‘ordinary’ person means in relation to public participation media underpins this discussion here and in subsequent chapters of the book.
For the last 20 years at least, research into forms of broadcasting that involve members of the public in one way or another has distinguished between ‘lay’ participants and those who are media professionals, or ‘experts’. Different kinds of discourses (Fairclough 1995) and footings (Goffman 1981) have typically been associated with each category – with perhaps the most prominent of these being the claim that experts speak for others while lay participants speak for themselves (Livingstone and Lunt 1994). However, this distinction between ordinary people and media professionals is, in many ways, no longer a sufficient or an adequate one in terms of describing the variety of identities and range of performances that constitute public participation in contemporary broadcasting. Because of the changing forms of public participation in the media that have been brought about by developments in radio broadcasting and, particularly, in new television genres, it is time to reassess and re-theorise the very notion of ‘ordinary’ as a way of talking about people who are non-media professionals and yet who are found in so many different contexts and genres, from the caller to a radio phone-in discussion to a contestant on X Factor. One of the central issues I will address in this book, therefore, is what it means to be ‘ordinary’ on radio and television, and how this concept of ordinariness may relate, or not, to the lay participants who, in various ways, are implicated and involved in the production of broadcast talk.
The first appearances of the ordinary person on radio is documented in Paddy Scannell's (1996) account of sociability in early broadcasting, and the production of ‘the social occasion’ in BBC radio broadcasts such as Harry Hopeful in the mid 1930s.1 This kind of programme ‘brings ordinary people into an unfamiliar and intimidating studio, puts them on stage and expects them to produce performances that are appropriate to the occasion’ (Scannell 1996: 29). The social occasions in this case were scripted interviews recorded live in a studio, but which were based on earlier spontaneous talk with the same participants in their own environment (e.g., workplace, village or local community) and re-scripted for the live recordings. In contemporary reality television programmes, while conventional notions of what may be appropriate to the occasion may have changed beyond recognition since the 1930s, as have the available recording and editing technologies, the practices of reshaping, semi-scripting or in some way rehearsing and staging ordinary interactions between ordinary people to produce broadcast talk as a performance for a viewing audience seem to be as pervasive as they ever were.
There are, of course, still occasions and opportunities for members of the public to participate in unscripted, spontaneous forms of broadcast talk. Many media genres such as radio phone-in programmes, political panel discussions with a studio audience and some television talk shows are made up of largely unscripted interactions between presenters, hosts, experts and guests, where the opportunity for audience participation to occur live on-air remains the primary focus. However, many of the participants in such programmes frequently work at establishing a particular identity for themselves which puts an altogether different value on our understanding of the term ‘ordinary’. Such identity work is discursively accomplished (Benwell and Stokoe 2006), and this brings us back to the questions of what talking as an ordinary citizen means and how do people do it? As I will show, whether as individuals or as representatives of a specific group, the identities claimed and displayed by lay participants in broadcast interactions seem to be far more complex and fine grained than simply being ordinary.
Ordinary identities and ordinary performances
As I have just noted, in much of the research on audience and public participation broadcasting, whether in relation to talk shows, radio phone-in shows or, more recently, to reality television and lifestyle formats, members of the public who take part in these programmes tend to be referred to as ‘ordinary people’ (Bonner 2003; Bignell 2005; Turner 2010). This term distinguishes them, as ‘lay’ participants, from other categories of participant: those who are employed by the media network as hosts or presenters; other media professionals, including journalists and politicians; and those who are labelled as ‘experts’ and who often represent institutions or organisations of one sort or another. And, as such a distinguishing category, it works – but only up to a certain point. Increasingly, it is being acknowledged that non-media professionals who take part in radio broadcasts and televised debates are often not speaking just for themselves as individuals, but on behalf of broader social constituencies or groups, while those who appear on television, particularly in the context of reality television genres, are people who are doing very specific kinds of being ‘ordinary’. And, as Myra Macdonald (2007) has observed, the use of such categories as ‘the public’ or ‘ordinary people’ tends to homogenise the differences between them. These ordinary people are not experts speaking on behalf of an institutional organisation or position, nor are they politicians or journalists who have a stake in framing their message in particular institutional ways, but to label them ‘ordinary’ members of the public does not fully capture the complex local identities and situated expertise that their participation frequently involves. We need therefore to examine much more closely the forms of talk that constitute the discourses of public participation broadcasting in order to understand how participant identities in a range of media contexts are being constructed and displayed, oriented to and performed.
In current research on public participation and the kind of television formats we have come to know as ‘reality TV’, the notion of ordinary is often closely related to the notion of performance (Bonner 2003; Turner 2010). Since the first series of Big Brother was aired in the summer of 2000 (on Channel 4 in the UK and franchised in other countries around the world), reality TV has turned into one of the most significant developments in media formats to involve the participation of ordinary people over the last 15 years or so. Taking up a point made by Frances Bonner (2003), Graeme Turner (2010) notes that ‘ordinary people on television are not ordinary like the rest of us; what they possess is the capacity to perform a particularly spectacular version of ordinariness in public’, and that ‘television is now providing more space for the ordinary person to perform a version of themselves than ever before’ (Turner 2010: 43–44). However, Turner goes on to argue that this ordinary identity is increasingly being ‘authored’ by the media, rather than ‘mediated’, giving broadcasters a powerful role in the constitution of participant identities for their own ends – that is, the proliferation of profitable formats in what is now a global market. In so doing, television is in the business of commodifying social identities in order to sell entertainment programmes in which, he says, ‘reality is […] satisfactorily performed by the ordinary citizen even when their “ordinariness” is at least debatable’ (Turner 2010: 19). This practice of authoring (as compared to mediating) social identity also raises questions about how such performances of ordinary identities are achieved. Although people are no longer placed on an intimidating stage and given a script to rehearse for an interview during which they are required to sound chatty and sociable, as in the Harry Hopeful days, what exactly does this participation require and what kind of performances of being ordinary, or, indeed, of being ‘not ordinary like the rest of us’, do they produce? From a discourse analytic perspective, we might ask: How are participants’ social identities being displayed and constructed within the context of reality television? And how are they being produced as a spectacle or performance for audiences?
In order to explore these issues around ordinary performance and identity through the lens of discourse analysis, the discussions in this book will be organised around three principal thematic areas. The first is how members of the public either position themselves within, or are positioned by, the mediated context of interaction in which relevant social identities are at stake. The second is the identification of particular discourses of public participation – where they are located, what they accomplish and how they are being performed, mediated or, indeed, authored. The final thematic area is the impact of interactivity on these identities and performances, and an examination of how the relationship between broadcasters, participants and audiences is shifting in a world where the pervasive presence of digital media may be playing its part in reconfiguring these discourses of participation.
In more concrete terms, the aim of this book is to identify and illustrate, through a series of empirical case studies and analyses of forms of mediated interaction, the different discourses of public participation in contemporary broadcast media. Throughout, I will be arguing that the distinction between ordinary people and media professionals is no longer a sufficient or an adequate one in terms of describing the variety of identities and range of performances that we find within these interactions. In addition, I will be exploring the emerging relationship between broadcast talk and developing platforms of digital communication, and how it is articulated with existing frameworks of public participation and participant identities. In the digital age of YouTube, and its invitation to ‘broadcast yourself’, once again, the traditional distinction between media professionals, experts and lay participants, in terms of production and performance, is effectively becoming more and more blurred (Hartley 2009; Tolson 2010). Furthermore, if we consider the increasingly prominent place and function of web- and text (SMS)-generated forms of participation in current broadcast output, then it really does seem that the relationship between broadcasters, participants and audiences in a world of multi-platform access to the media is radically changing. From a discourse perspective, where and how do we see this change occurring? For example, are digital platforms offering new arenas of public engagement, in terms of discussion and opinion-giving, in relation to traditional broadcast phone-ins or talk shows? How are the modes of mobile and web-based media – chatting, emailing, texting, tweeting – changing these forms of public participation on radio and television, and where are they most in evidence? Again, I will argue that the communicative relationship between traditional forms of broadcasting and the affordances of what used to be called ‘new media’ technologies is far from being a straightforward one.2 An emailed question, for example, is not the same thing as a question delivered over the telephone, while a text or a tweet can open up different, new participatory possibilities within the framework of a live broadcast.
What I propose in this book is a re-examination of these discursive relationships in terms of the available access for audience participation through emails, texts and tweets, and how these give rise to different forms of participation within broadcast discourse. This will include looking in detail at the kinds of things that people do and say on air, and the constraints and affordances of how they get to do and say them when new media technologies are involved. How do the traditional forms of talk – including discursive activities such as asking questions and telling stories, opinion-giving and arguing, advice-giving and receiving – become adapted to new modes of communication and access to TV and radio? The contexts for such activities will include phone-in discussions, reality shows, advice-giving on radio shows and political question/answer broadcasts, where we can critically consider the function of email and web forums (Thornborrow and Fitzgerald 2002) as well as the contrasts between participation as interaction and the notion of interactivity (Macdonald 2007).
Here, we should proceed with a note of caution, however. As Jannis Androutsopoulos points out, ‘digital data are available in overwhelming amounts, making it difficult to select and focus on one specific sample or site of discourse’ (Androutsopoulos 2013: 238). In taking a discourse analytic approach to the seemingly infinite and diffuse world of the web, it is often difficult to establish clear research parameters and to decide where to draw boundaries. Since digital platforms are increasingly connected on multiple levels and content changes moment by moment, pinning down particular phenomena for analytical purposes can be problematic. I intend, therefore, to delimit quite carefully the scope of interactivity under investigation, and focus specifically on examples of the ways in which programmes that include some form of public participation either incorporate or generate digital participation and engagement; f...
