Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action

Pilar Garces-Conejos Blitvich, N. Lorenzo-Dus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230368729, 9780230368712
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313461
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. Chapters provide rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic/cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and USA.

Part I

The Reality of Discourse and Discourse Analysis: Theory, Approaches, Practices

1

Reality television: a discourse-analytical perspective

Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus

Introduction

The empirical chapters of this book offer original studies of reality television (RTV henceforth) in a wide range of cultural contexts. Importantly, they all share a discourse-analytical approach even though they employ different discourse-analytic frameworks in order to address specific research questions, from multimodality and interactional sociolinguistics to Critical Discourse Analysis. The aim of this chapter is to explain the need, at this point in time, for a discourse-analytical approach within RTV scholarship. Doing so requires explaining our conceptualization of RTV as a discourse, one comprised of various genres. It also requires reviewing, albeit briefly, the two broad areas on which the empirical studies of RTV included in this book focus: identity and impoliteness.

RTV and discourse analysis

RTV has become a widespread phenomenon, from its modest beginnings in ‘actuality programming’ in the America of the 1940s. Forerunners include Candid Camera, Real People, The Gong Show (Siegel 2003), and the Chinese version of Pop Idol, Super Girl, which drew an audience of 400 million people and 8 million text votes in 2005, only to be outright banned by the government in 2006. As expected, with the proliferation of show formats that fall loosely under the RTV label and the globalization of some of those formats (e.g. Big Brother, Idol franchise), RTV has come under considerable (non)academic scrutiny. Non-academic commentary has often focused on the seeming ills of RTV, which have been said to include a debasing of cultural and even moral standards in society (Genzlinger 2011; Sanneh 2011). Some academic commentary has voiced similar criticism (Turner 2010). Yet, RTV is also recognized as a phenomenon well worthy of academic enquiry (Lorenzo-Dus 2006, 2009b; Tolson 2006). Opinion on its having contributed to an egalitarian, democratization agenda in the media is however mixed, with some scholars crediting RTV with empowering of citizens through facilitating their access to the public domain of the media (e.g. White 2002) and others seeing in this manifestation of the ‘demotic turn’ (Turner 2010) only superficial democratization (e.g. Lorenzo-Dus 2008, 2009b) and, in some cases, open exploitation of ‘ordinary folk’ (e.g. Culpeper 2005).

Scholarship has also sought to circumscribe the phenomenon, specifically trying to provide definitions of what ‘counts’ or otherwise as RTV. Whereas some include talk shows and game shows under that label, others limit their selections to the Survivor or Big Brother formats (Collins 2009). For Holmes and Jermyn (2004, p. 3), what we consider RTV has moved from ‘crime and emergency service-based texts, the docusoap trend, to what might be conceived as a “docu-show” or possible “game-doc” phase, in which factual-entertainment programming has increasingly incorporated elements of the game show.’ To date, though, no agreement seems to have been reached as regards definition.

A separate, though related, matter of academic concern is the label ‘reality’ itself, which many regard as suspiciously essentialist and pre-modern. Today, most scholars would agree that what we perceive as ‘reality’ is in fact cultural, constructed fiction. It has also been argued that the label ‘RTV’ is too general to be helpful (Barnfield 2002). We will return to these two issues – categorization and the constructed nature of ‘reality’ in RTV – later in our discussion.

In the same way that it is quite obvious by now that, far from being an ephemeral fad, RTV is here to stay, academic interest in RTV has continued to grow, especially post-2000 (see Collins 2009 for an excellent review). However, this interest has mostly come from academic fields such as media and cultural studies, philosophy, or ethics. With few exceptions (e.g. Bousfield 2007, 2008; Culpeper, Bousfield & Wichmann 2003; Culpeper 2005; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Lorenzo-Dus & Bou-Franch 2013; Lorenzo-Dus, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Thornborrow & Morris 2004; Tolson 2006), scholars have not looked closely at the ‘language’ of RTV – at its discourse, in a micro-analytical sense. Even when scholarly works have claimed either to take a discursive approach or to refer to matters related to ‘language’ (Friedman 2002; Kavka 2008; Lemi & Park 2011; Reid 2007), they have often done so from a macro-analytical perspective, rarely descending to the textual level. And in those cases in which the latter is explicitly cited, textual samples are generally provided in support of the writers’ claims but no analysis based on linguistic theory is carried out. Yet, work based on micro analysis of media texts, we would argue, has contributed significantly to our understanding of the media in general and broadcasting in particular (see Corner 2000, for example, for a defence of textual (discourse) analysis in the study of the media). Within the latter, work within the ‘broadcast talk’ tradition has yielded – and continues to yield – novel, rigorous analyses of a range of television and radio formats, contributing fresh insights to issues regarded also as key in the cognate fields of political, media and cultural studies, such as media authenticity and bias/neutralism. It is therefore the overarching goal of this book to advance this work within the context of RTV by providing systematic, close analysis of its textual practices. It is our contention that the kind of systematic, theory-grounded examination of actual textual practices that characterizes discourse analysis as a field can provide both the theoretical and analytical tools that scholarship on RTV needs.

Discourse versus genre

To be properly understood, we also contend, RTV should be tackled as a discourse (à la Fairclough 2003; Gee 2005; or Scollon & Scollon 2001), rather than a genre. As a matter of fact, it seems to us that the difficulties found by many scholars in conceptualizing RTV come from their trying to fit under the genre rubric its multiplicity of formats (Penzhorn & Pitout 2007, p. 65). Reality TV may have started out as a genre, but it has certainly evolved into a discourse.

Other scholars have raised similar concerns regarding the notion of genre and its applicability to TV in general. Caughie notes, for example, that while ‘assumptions of genre permeate television studies’ (1991, p. 127), these have been less theorized, interrogated and historicized than studies of film genre. For her part, Stempel-Mumford describes how ‘a profound theoretical uncertainty’ underlies most discussions of television form: ‘a lack of an adequate theory of genre as a whole’ (1995, p. 19). Holmes and Jermyn (2004, p. 6) relate this to the ambiguity surrounding whether the concept is in fact ‘directly applicable to the medium’. Moreover, although the notion of genre is pervasive in the discussion of TV, notions of genre are often taken as a given and not overly theorized. One of the obvious pitfalls, even in very rigorous approaches to RTV such as Holmes and Jermyn’s (2004), is the lack of a definition of what is understood as ‘genre’.

The notion of genre is far from being uniformly understood in the literature. Within linguistics and related disciplines, for example, there are different schools of thought regarding how the analysis of genre should be tackled. A sound theory of genre could solve some of the problems that scholars face when trying to conceptualize RTV, namely its inherent hybridity and the constructive nature of discursive categorizations (Holmes & Jermyn 2004). A sound theory of genre needs, in turn, to be embedded within a sound theory of discourse, as we will argue below. In his insightful essay on film and genre, Neale (1990) claims that genres need to be coalesced into discourses in order to be properly studied. His discursive approach to genre, however, sees the study of texts going beyond the text itself to encompass the contexts in which they are produced, marketed and assessed: ‘the mass-produced, popular genres have to be understood within an economic context, as conditioned by specific economic contradictions – in particular, of course, those that operate within specific institutions and industries… it is also important to stress the peculiar nature of films as aesthetic commodities, commodities demanding at least a degree of novelty and difference from one another…’ (p. 64). Neale, then, sees genres as part of discourses, but with the latter being understood à la Foucault or Bourdieu, that is, as high-level social structures, rather than with a focus on the linguistic realization of those structures, i.e., in Gee’s (2005) terms, as discourses with a little ‘d’.

Understanding genre and discourse

Our view of discourse is that it is always situated, anchored in social practices or genres. Therefore, a discussion of the language of any social practice, such as that of many formats of RTV to be carried out in this book, needs to be preceded by a discussion of genres, as understood from a linguistic perspective, and how these relate to discourse, especially because genre and discourse are multidisciplinary terms which may mean different things to different people.

Our understanding of genre and discourse draws from Swales (1990), Fairclough (2003), Pennycook (2010), Scollon and Scollon (2001) and Gee (2005). Within many subfields of linguistics, Swales’s approach and definition of genre has been widely influential. Swales (1990) defines genre as:

A class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style… exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience.

Accordingly, a given communicative purpose triggers a particular genre, which is realized by a specific move structure or functionally distinct stages along which the genre unfolds. The move structure, in turn, is realized by rhetorical strategies or formal choices of content and style. In his discussion of genre, Swales draws upon a trend initiated in the 1980s that saw genre not as text or text type, but as social action (Miller 1984).

This view of genre as social action or social practice is at the core of Fairclough’s (2003) discourse model as well as Pennycook’s (2010) elaboration of it. In Fairclough’s model, social practices are equated with ‘orders of discourse’ (a network of social practices in its language aspect). The elements of orders of discourse are discourses (ways of representing, i.e., two different discourses may represent the same area of the world from different perspectives), genres (ways of (inter)acting discursively) and styles (ways of being, ways of constructing particular social or personal identities). These elements are dialectically related in a top-down/bottom-up fashion: Discourses (representational meanings, e.g. political discourse) are enacted in genres (actional meanings, e.g. presidential speech) and inculcated in styles (identification meanings, Obama’s presidential speech). Actions and identities (including genres and styles) are, in turn, represented in discourse (Fairclough 2003, p. 29). Discourses, genres and styles are durable and stable, but they are also in constant flux. At the style level, agents are carriers, as it were, of discourse/genres. However, they do not merely reproduce them, by constructing recognizable identities, but can reinterpret/reinvent them in a way that, if constant and shared, may significantly alter the genre and, in turn, the discourse.

Fairclough’s level of discourse corresponds broadly to Scollon and Scollon’s (2001) concept of discourse systems. Scollon and Scollon define discourse as systems of communication shared by certain communities, such as corporations, public (state) school teachers, fashion experts or those involved as producers, participants and audiences of RTV programmes. According to Scollon and Scollon (2001, p. 107): ‘Such broad systems of discourse form a kind of self-contained system of communication with a shared language or jargon, with particular ways in which people learn what they need to know to become members, with a particular ideological position and with quite specific forms of interpersonal relationships among members of these groups.’ One becomes a member of a discourse system, is socialized into it, by mastering a series of preferred forms of discourse (genres) used by the community to carry out their business.

We see RTV as a discourse system, rather than a genre. The socialization of members into the system is manifold and depends on whether they belong to the producing, participant or audience sides. In the case of participants, for instance, it occurs through exposure to RTV shows and through selection processes prior to the filming of programmes. It can be argued that the broad ideology of RTV is egalitarian, democratic (but see Turner 2010), and this egalitarian ideology is reflected in an apparent lack of power that blurs the differences between experts and lay participants, or fosters strong parasocial relationships between viewers and participants, which some have called ‘intimate’ (Penzhorn & Pitout 2007, p. 67).

Interpersonal relationships among members, as they relate to the linguistic notion of face, tie back to the general ideology of the RTV discourse system, but are nonetheless genre-specific, i.e. the norms regulating interpersonal relationships vary from genre to genre. RTV takes place within an institution, that of broadcasting, and can therefore be regarded as public discourse. The expectations of civility that guide public manifestations of discourse (Sellers 2004) are hence also expected to apply to RTV. At the same time, though, RTV often – though not always – claims to give viewers unprecedented access to the ‘private realm’ of participants. The result is a conscious, on the part of the producers at least, blurring between public and private discourses – one of the many blurrings brought about by RTV. Aspects of the private realm of participants relating to private, be it sexual, family or friendship, relationships are routinely publicly displayed – performed – in ways that assign primacy to emotions in general and conflict-based ones, such as anger or jealousy, in particular. This accounts, at least in part, for the high levels of incivility, linguistic aggression and confrontation that can be found in many genres of RTV. Below, we discuss the role that impoliteness, linguistic aggression and conflict, play in the success of RTV.

Penzhorn and Pitout (2007) attribute four characteristics to, in their terminology, the genre of RTV: (i) a focus on ordinary people, (ii) voyeurism, (iii) audience participation, and (iv) an attempt to simulate real life. These easily apply to our description of the RTV discourse system: the focus on ordinary people and the attempt to simulate real life tie back to the use of language that seeks to resemble ‘ordinary’, ‘casual’ talk and to the democratic ideology that seemingly underlies the system. Audience participation can also be related...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Reality of Discourse and Discourse Analysis: Theory, Approaches, Practices
• Part II Reality Television and Identity
• Part III Reality Television and Aggression
• Index