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Talent TV

Benn, Boyle and Baudrillard, Cowell, Clegg and Culture

“Twitches”

Convergence

“We’re really talking about a converged interactive media industry. There’s an increasing interplay between gaming, online, TV and films – it’s all coming together.”

Jon Kingsbury, NESTA, 2010

Media 2.0

Lots of DIFFERENT IDEAS on this. Very much a CONTESTED view.

Interaction, partly facilitated by technological convergence

More ‘interactive’ – yes

But also more democratic?

Baudrillard’s hyper-real?

neither dream nor reality but simulacrum – fetishised reality

Zizek

Virtual reality = product deprived of its substance.

“Just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual reality is experienced as reality without being so. What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity”.

(2002:231)

Interactive / Democratic?

Or Demotic?

Turner - there is no clear connection between the exposure given to ‘everyday people’ by reality TV and any kind of progressive or emancipatory shifts.

Thus the ‘demotic turn’ equates merely to the increase in exposure of / to the public with no necessary democratic outcomes.

Rather, the rise of celebrity culture – and with it the clamour for us to seek the prize of commodifying ourselves as celebrities - has had the effect of charging the contemporary media with the power to ‘translate’ cultural identity.

Stuff to Read

David Gauntlett

Sonia Livingstone

David Buckingham

Annette Hill

Michael Wesch

Dan Gillmor

Henry Jenkins

Graeme Turner

Time for your “twitches”

Critical Media Literacy .…

Read all the different ideas

Pick your examples

Apply the reading to the examples

Weigh up the debate

Develop an informed, academic view

Create / intervene in the culture.