A reality of us, but made or shown by whom?

          The actions and communication of individuals is often a matter of interest in the building of culture. With the availability of the internet, and the occurrences of online diaries, we have in many ways become a confessional society. Whether the images that we show to the world, live or planned, redefine us, is a question of relevance. In Mark Andrejevic‘s book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, he tackles the concept of ameture content production with an analysis of the webcam artist Ana Vog who presented quite a progressive challenge to the top-down mass media. “The Internet allows people like her to become content producers, rather than remaining merely media consumers”. He analyzed the U.K. reality series Video Diaries, in which individuals from the general public were given cameras to records their own stories. He concluded that not only does this new era of interactivity substantially confront monopolistic media, but through the internet “not just that it increases the chances of an obscure outsider to make it big but that it allows everyone to gain greater participation in and control over the mediated version of reality in which they are immersed”. This all in contrast to reality TV which although being of an ideology of democratization, it merely employes the audience to participate and thus entice them into production of a “relatively inexpensive and profitable entertainment product”

             Here we see two sisters who appear to be under the age of 14, and they posted a video of themselves acting out a skit involving characters that they’ve possibly seen in their own experience, or characaturized in movies they’ve seen, or possibly are exaggerated from their own imaginative fantasies. Several of us will remember acting out what we saw of reality as a playtime when we were children, whether it be the domestic, as in the case of playing ‘house’ where kids play out the characatures of stereotypes that they see on TV, or through exaggeration of a child’s view of the adult world. This may be a naive example in the age of latch-key kids and a far more counter hegemonic role of women in the result of post-feminism. However, in this case, the two sisters are playing out a skit featuring the stereotypes of ‘a stuck up cheerleader’ and the ‘nerd who wants to be popular’ and of course, the cliché persona of an overprotective and conservative mother. The resulting video that was posted last fall is thus a rather strange combination of the power of these girls to create their own story and be able to tell it to the rest of the world, and a slightly overpowering sensation of intrusiveness in the viewing of this, as it is simply two young girls recreating characters in a situation that might have been just a playtime of any pre-adolescent girls. Our being able to see their manufactured reality with the strange view that they have acquired, as in the case of the ‘cheerleader’ asking the ‘nerd’,  ”Why do you pull your leg up like that?” and the ‘nerd’ replies that her mother doesn’t like her to open her legs wide. A comment that might be the norm in a heated argument with a parent about modesty, but in the context of a viewable video where these girls are not professional actors that are in a safety net of fame and common adult steering of their acting and internet use, the situation is discomfiting. One may be able to assume however that a similar situation done in the context of reality TV would possibly be even more so.

Sources: http://books.google.com/books?id=AcKSJFjNN00C&printsec=frontcover#PPA5,M1

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