REALITY CULTURE
Reality TV is Here to Stay The year was 1968. Legendary American artist Andy Warhol was preparing an exhibition in Sweden and decided to write the following sentence in the program: “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes”
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or some people the reality genre has tant change in the way we play videogames trend for exposure and realism is permeatits origins earlier than Warhol’s proand even watch movies: The gaming experiing in a way that we sometimes fail to see. phetic quote, as they consider Candid ence is more real than ever, offering 360 deAccording to a 2012 Euromonitor consumer Camera to be the prototype of reality grees of movement using only your head. trend analysis, the popularity of social netTV. The long-lived television show which sees In a similar fashion, YouTube has startworks themselves is closely connected to practical jokes played on unsuspecting straned offering 360-degree videos, which means this leaning, especially in terms of the ways gers while a camera documents their reactions that you don’t only see what the camera is in which the majority of users choose to naractually started broadcasting in 1948. pointing at but the entire world around it. rate their lives on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Others claim the true predecessor of what As we embrace reality-based culture, we alInstagram and so on. we now known as reality TV was the American so become more susceptible to it. Companies At the same time, audiences increasingly documentary series An American Family, which rushed to take advantage of this new techask for less impersonal communications with viewers first watched in 1973. For twelve weeks, nology, creating new-school, realer-than-evservices, products and businesses. That means episodes documented the lives of a Santa er ads for a series of products. everything from preferring to play online rouBarbara family going through a divorce. But there are even more ways in which lette to having the opportunity to chat in real What we now know so well as reality televiwe get our reality fix. Nowadays, more adtime with customer assistants on a website. In sion began in the late 1980s, when we saw the vertisements than ever before feature “real,” a way, even the tendency to turn to sites like first broadcast of American series COPS, which everyday people, who either lend their face Yelp and TripAdvisor to post and read online rehas been going strong for 28 seasons and name to product campaigns, narReality TV can be polarizing – Still, it was clearly the Netherlands rate their experiences with a service or – Tiësto’s birthplace with its thriving some hate it, others love it, and become part of marketing in other ways Electronic dance music (EDM) culture – As for reality TV itself, it has been for many it’s a guilty pleasure. that produced the first gem of pure realsteadily popular: A 2015 survey in the US But the element of reality is ity TV, called Nummer 28. The series folshowed that reality TV programs are the obviously and certainly here to lowed the lives of seven strangers, stufourth most popular genre of TV show, dents sharing a house in Amsterdam. with 34% of the audience watching. Last stay, in one form or another Shortly after that, MTV casted seven year, an exhaustive historical review of strangers to spend three months in the same reality television counted 309 different proviews of local restaurants is closely connected house and have their interactions broadcastgrams in the US only. to the cultural shift towards reality – we’d rathed for the whole world to see. The show was, Long-lived, then groundbreaking reality er see real people’s experience in an establishof course, The Real World and it has been atcompetition franchises began to pop-up on ment than look at its website. tributed with helping break taboos and depict our television sets in the late ‘90s and earTHE FUTURE contemporary reality in a brand-new way. ly 2000s, took the entire globe by storm and In 1999, the film The Matrix explored the Nowadays, viewers are used to a number still dominate ratings: Big Brother, American idea that perhaps the world we live in is not of different reality sub-genres. From courtIdol, Survivor, America’s Got Talent and real but a virtual reality created by intelligent rooms to tattoo parlors, reality TV offers us MasterChef were all exported from their origimachines. That was the first time many peoglimpses into the lives, skills, struggles, sucnal countries of creation for localized producple were introduced to the concept of vircesses and (often epic) failures of hundreds tions in different countries. tual reality. Seventeen years later, in earof people who often got the 15 minutes of Yes, reality TV can be polarizing – some ly 2016, consumers are able to buy the first fame Warhol once promised. hate it, others love it, and for many it’s a mass-market virtual reality headsets, such as All in all, recent decades have seen a maguilty pleasure. But the element of reality is Oculus Rift and Sony’s PlayStation VR. This jor cultural shift towards reality that extends obviously and certainly here to stay, in one technological development marks an imporfar beyond the realm of our TV boxes. The form or another. ■
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