Ordinary People and the Media

The Demotic Turn

Graeme Turner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781848601673, 9781848601666
• eBook ISBN: 9781446244265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The ?demotic turn? is a term coined by Graeme Turner to describe the increasing visibility of the ?ordinary person? in the media today.

In this dynamic and insightful book he explores the ?whys? and ?hows? of the ?everyday? individual?s willingness to turn themselves into media content through:

· Celebrity culture,

· Reality TV,

· DIY websites,

· Talk radio,

· User-generated materials online.

Initially proposed in order to analyse the pervasiveness of celebrity culture, this book further develops the idea of the demotic turn as a means of examining the common elements in a range of ?hot spots? in debates within media and cultural studies today.

Refuting the proposition that the demotic turn necessarily carries with it a democratising politics, this book examines the political and cultural function of the demotic turn in media production and consumption across the fields of reality TV, print and electronic news and current affairs journalism, citizen and online journalism, talk radio, and user-generated content online.

It examines these fields in order to outline a structural shift in what the western media has been doing lately, and to suggest that these media activities represent something much more fundamental than contemporary media fashion.

1

Ordinary People: celebrity, tabloid culture, and the function of the media¹

Ordinary celebrities

Let me begin by reviewing the recent trends in the production of celebrity which provoke the kind of questions I want to raise. I am by no means the first to have noticed what has become quite a programmatic shift in the preferred territory for the development of celebrity through particular media platforms – television and the internet in particular. This is a shift from the elite to the ordinary. ‘Ordinariness’, to be sure, has always occupied a place among the repertoire of celebrity discourses as well as within the core programming formats of western television itself (Bonner, 2003). Elsewhere, Frances Bonner, P. David Marshall and I have pointed out the contradictoriness of the discourses of celebrity – their capacity to simultaneously valorize a celebrity’s elite status while nonetheless celebrating their ‘intrinsic ordinariness’ (Turner et al., 2000: 13). It is also true that ‘ordinary people’ have always been ‘discovered’, suddenly extracted from their everyday lives and processed for stardom; both the film and the music industry incorporated such processes into their cultural mythologies as well as their industrial practice many years ago. In recent times, however, the use of this practice has grown dramatically and become far more systematic. Whole media formats are now devoted to it, and the contemporary media consumer has become increasingly accustomed to following what happens to the ‘ordinary’ person who has been plucked from obscurity to enjoy a highly circumscribed celebrity. The Big Brother housemates are the most obvious example² and, among these, it has turned out, ‘ordinariness’ is so fundamental to their casting that it is non-negotiable. In some local versions of the format, Big Brother housemates have been evicted after they were found to be already working within the entertainment industry and thus attempting to merge their new visibility as celebritized ‘ordinary people’ with a pre-existing media career.

The trend has a broader provenance than the casting of Big Brother, however. As Nick Couldry points out, ordinary people have never been more desired by, or more visible within, the media; nor have their own utterances ever been reproduced with the faithfulness, respect and accuracy that they are today (Couldry, 2003: 102).

The explosion of reality TV, confessional talk formats, docu-soaps and so-called reality-based game shows over the last decade has significantly enhanced television’s demand for ordinary people desiring ‘celebrification’. The expansion of both the demand and the supply side has occurred in a symbiotic and accelerating cycle fuelled by the relatively sudden expansion of the global trade in TV formats. Although the ‘reality’ of reality TV is of course a construction, what has become significant is the way these formats have exploited the reality effect of television’s ‘liveness’: namely, the foregrounded liveness (as in, what we are watching is happening right now!) enhances the illusion that what is being watched is real or genuine, thus challenging the competing suspicion that it is only being staged for the camera. Indeed, reality TV is often quite exorbitantly ‘live’: it is occurring in real time as we watch it on a live video-stream via the internet, and those wishing to interact with it directly can do so by accessing one of the web-sites or online chatrooms, or by participating in the audience vote. Stripped across the schedule for months at a time in a set daily timeslot, as it is in many countries, Big Brother is not only received as a live media event, it also becomes embedded in the routine daily structures of the audience’s everyday lives. (It may well be that which is the most significant ‘reality’ effect of reality TV, not what is actually happening in the house or on the Idol audition set.)

Among the consequences of this trend towards developing the ordinary celebrity through the success of reality TV formats is an acceleration of the industrial cycle of use and disposal for the products of such programmes. If performing on Big Brother can generate celebrity within a matter of days, this same celebrity can also disappear just as quickly. In fact, it is essential that each crop of Big Brother housemates can be easily replaced by the next group if the format is to successfully reproduce itself, series after series. In this regard, television’s production of celebrity can truly be regarded as a manufacturing process into which the product’s planned obsolescence is incorporated. And that product is manufactured for a particular audience. The replaceable celebrity-commodity (Turner et al., 2000: 12–13) is structurally fundamental to both of the leading primetime formats aimed at the key 14–35-year-old demographics in most western markets: reality TV and soap opera. In order to define this particular iteration of celebrity – the individual with no particular talents that might encourage expectations of work in the entertainment industry, no specific career objectives beyond the achievement of media visibility, and an especially short lifecycle as a public figure – Chris Rojek has coined the term ‘celetoid’:

Celetoids are the accessories of cultures organized around mass communications and staged authenticity. Examples include lottery winners, one-hit wonders, stalkers, whistle-blowers, sports’ arena streakers, have-a-go-heroes, mistresses of public figures and the various other social types who command media attention one day, and are forgotten the next. (2001: 20–1)

Given what appears to be our culture’s appetite for consuming celebrity and the scale of demand for the new stories, gossip and pictures the celebrity media industries generate,³ the accelerated commodity lifecycle of the celetoid has emerged as an effective industrial solution to the problem of satisfying that demand.

In relation to the broader culture within which the consumption of celebrity occurs, these trends have resulted in the idea of celebrity itself mutating: no longer a magical condition, research suggests that it is fast becoming an almost reasonable expectation for us to have of our everyday lives.⁴ The opportunity of becoming a celebrity has spread beyond the various elites and entered into the expectations of the population in general. Among the effects of this, in turn, is the proliferation of various kinds of DIY celebrity; on the internet, in particular, ‘celebrification’ has become a familiar mode of cyber-self-presentation. As I have discussed in Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2004: Chapter 5), this is sometimes regarded as a reason for optimism, a sign of the egalitarianization of celebrity as the means of production are seized by the ordinary citizen.

The more important development, in my view, is the scale upon which the media have begun to produce celebrity on their own. Where once the media were more or less content to pick up celebrities produced through a range of sports, news and entertainment contexts, or to respond to approaches from publicists, promotions and public relations personnel, contemporary television in particular has introduced a much greater degree of vertical integration into the industrial structure which produces their celebrities. In addition to exploiting those who have already been established through other means, television has learnt that it can also invent, produce, market and sell on its celebrities from scratch – and on a much larger scale than ever before. Casting ordinary people into game shows, docu-soaps and reality TV programming enables television producers to ‘grow their own’ celebrities and to control how they are marketed before, during and after production – all of this while still subordinating the achieved celebrity of each individual to the needs of the particular programme or format. The extent to which this is now done, and the pervasive presence its most successful products can establish, make this an extremely significant shift not only in terms of the production and consumption of celebrity but also in terms of how the media now participate in the cultural construction of identity and desire.

Cultural and media studies have responded in a number of ways to these developments. We have had discussions which helpfully problematize the ‘reality’ of reality TV, as well as examining the performativeness of the identities on offer through this newly vertically integrated mediascape (that is, the motivated performance of ordinariness or authenticity is the focus of critical analysis and attention: see Kilborn, 2003). There are post-Habermasian critiques which see the mass production of celebrity as yet another instance of the media’s tendency to produce simulations of the real as spectacles for consumption, and thus as another instance of the diminution of the public sphere. There are also suggestions, as I noted earlier, that the increased diversity evident in the contemporary production and consumption of celebrity contains a political potential that may well be positive (Dovey, 2000). Among the latter formulations is the argument that such programming engages in particularly direct and useful ways with the socio-cultural process of modelling ethical behaviours and identities (Hay and Ouellette, 2008;Lumby, 2003).

The most influential example in this context, and one upon which I want to build, has been developed through John Hartley’s deployment of the term ‘democratainment’ (1999: see Chapter 12). Hartley has argued in several of his books that we are witnessing the democratization of the media: breaking with more elite formations of popular entertainment, dispensing with the privileging of information and education, and allowing the media to focus on the construction of cultural identities. In Understanding Celebrity, I challenged the idea of ‘democratainment’ by querying the connection it argues between democracy and the proliferation of DIY celebrity, the opening up of media access, and the explosion of ‘the ordinary’ in media content. I agree with John Hartley that the trends we have both noticed have, among other things, opened up media access to women, to people of colour, and to a wider array of class positions; that the increased volume of media content now available could result in increased powers of self-determination becoming available to media consumers; and that there is every reason why the positive by-products of this increased volume and diversity might excite optimism about their democratic potential.

Nonetheless, I would also argue, the ‘democratic’ part of the ‘democratainment’ neologism is an occasional and accidental consequence of the ‘entertainment’ part, and its least systemic component. It is important to remember that celebrity still remains a systematically hierarchical and exclusive category, no matter how much it proliferates. No amount of public participation in game shows, reality TV or DIY celebrity web-sites will alter the fact that, overall, the media industries still remain in control of the symbolic economy, and that they still strive to operate this economy in the service of their own interests. Overwhelmingly now (and this has accelerated dramatically in recent years as governments’ support for public broadcasting, in particular, has declined) these interests are commercial. It is worth stating that this fact alone should give us pause in suggesting they might also be democratic, simply because they have multiplied the range of choices available to the consumer. Robert McChesney’s historical research into the debates about the introduction of commercial broadcasting into the United States in the 1930s provides us with a useful reminder that there is no natural connection between the commercial media and a democratic politics:

Few people thought at the time that corporate-owned, advertising-supported broadcasting was the natural American system. That came later, when the PR industry went into fifth gear after the system was consolidated. Commercial broadcasting certainly was not regarded as inherently democratic. (As the BBC put it at the time, the claim by capitalist broadcasters that commercial broadcasting was democratic was ‘outside our comprehension’ and, as the BBC politely put it, ‘clearly springs from a peculiarly American conception of democracy’.) (2007: 104)

Consequently, and while I might sympathize with more optimistic accounts, I also want to insist that there is no necessary connection between, on the one hand, a broadening demographic in the pattern of access to media representation and, on the other hand, a democratic politics. Diversity is not of itself intrinsically democratic irrespective of how it is generated or by whom. Hence, it is my view that these developments are more correctly described as a demotic, rather than a democratic, turn.

In a recent article, Nick Couldry and Tim Markham exposed an aspect of this issue to some detailed empirical examination.⁵ As part of a broader research exercise, the Public Connection project (Couldry et al., 2007), they focused upon how ‘celebrity culture … (as it intersects with the growth of reality TV, fashion culture and other areas of today’s media cultures) offers connection to a world of politics and public issues’ (2007: 404). Working with survey groups generating weekly diaries over a period of up to three months, the project developed data on ‘media consumption, attitudes to media and politics, and public actions, and also the contexts in which all of these occur’ (ibid: 407). The diarists’ accounts indicated that celebrity culture did not seem to connect them with public issues, and subsequent analysis of the groups who made up what the research nominated as the ‘celebrity cluster’ revealed that this part of the sample was especially disengaged from public issues and questions of the public interest (as they were defined by the project). While the quantity of this group’s media consumption was close to the average, there were some clear signs of significant differences in how they made use of it:

Some 25% fewer respondents in the celebrity cluster, compared with the traditional cluster, feel a sense of duty to keep up with what’s going on in the world … It is thus the lack of engagement with news, in parallel with a lack of social and political engagement [in terms of their personal and leisure activities], rather than lack of exposure to news … which marks the celebrity cluster as distinct. (ibid: 417)

The research is quite detailed and I am reluctant to rob it of its specificities and nuances by dealing with it too quickly here, but the conclusion of the article makes the point that we need to be careful about how confidently we can rely on any ‘presumptions about the resonance of celebrity narratives for whole populations’ (ibid: 418). Indeed, as Couldry and Markham report, there was considerable discussion in the diaries which could be interpreted as ‘commentary on how irrelevant [celebrities] were to genuine public issues’ (ibid: 418). Moreover, in the researchers’ view, some of the more optimistic readings of the consumption of celebrity as constituting a kind of DIY political activity are very much wide of the mark:

Those who followed celebrity culture were those least likely to be politically engaged. This is of course not surprising, and is certainly linked to the gendering of political culture, itself an important and socially regressive factor. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that following celebrity culture represents a positive choice by this group … Our argument is not … that there is anything ‘wrong’ with this choice, since such a choice can only be evaluated in the context of the wider gendering and polarization of the UK public sphere. Our point is rather that there is little evidence for some optimistic claims that this aspect of popular culture provides any potential routes into political culture, even in an expanded sense. If people’s engagement with celebrity culture is part of a turning away from concern with issues that require public resolution (away from, in our definition, ‘public connection’), then no amount of well-crafted messages will make a difference. (ibid: 418, emphasis in original)

As a result, the authors say the research does raise questions about the ‘problematic relation between celebrity culture’s “demotic turn” and actual prospects for democratic renewal and political change’ (ibid: 418).

Producing ordinary identities

If the demotic turn is not producing democracy, then what is it doing? This is not an easy question to answer, and each chapter in this book will have its own angle from which it will try to respond. To start at the simplest level, though, we can say that it is generating content – a lot of content. What the media have to gain from their mining of the rich seam of ‘the ordinary’ is, at the very least, unlimited performances of diversity. Performing ordinariness has become an end in itself, and thus a rich and (or so it seems) almost inexhaustible means of generating new content for familiar formats. A number of media (television, radio, the internet) have developed production techniques which help to ensure that ‘reality’ is satisfactorily performed by the ordinary citizen even when their ‘ordinariness’ – given the processes of selection through which they have had to progress – is at least debatable. One of the means through which these process...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Praise for the book
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the demotic turn
• 1 Ordinary People: celebrity, tabloid culture and the function of the media
• 2 Reality TV and the Construction of Cultural Identities
• 3 Redefining Journalism: citizens, blogs and the rise of opinion
• 4 Talk Radio, Populism and the Demotic Voice
• 5 Revenge of the Nerds: digital optimism and user-generated content online
• 6 The Entertainment Age: the media and consumption today
• Bibliography
• Index