Machine generated contents note: 1. Show me the Money -- 2. Klutz Films -- 3. Camcorder Cults -- 4. Firestarters -- Re-viewing Reality TV -- 5. Confessing Nation -- 6. McDox 'R' Us -- Docu-Soap and the Triumph of Trivia -- 7. Squaring Circles
Summary
True confessions, fake films and docu-soaps - in the last ten years factual television has been transformed by an explosion of new genres. Freakshow offers a serious look at 'reality TV' in an attempt to understand the mass media's fascination with intimacy, deviancy, and horror. Jon Dovey analyses reality TV in terms of the political economy of the mass media. He investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal the only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives? Are the politics of the self the only alternative to the defunct grand narratives of yesterday? In concentrating not on the reception of these new television forms but on the choices, models and agendas which inform their production, Dovey reveals the relationships between social anxieties, economic pressures and their specific inflections in media texts. In a critical analysis of media industry practice, Dovey asks why directors can't stay out of range of their own cameras - and what is the role of the television of intimacy within broadcasting
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-188) and index
Notes
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
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