Reality television makeovers in context
Debate about whether reality on or off-screen is 'more real' epitomises current fascination with the blurring of lines between the two.
The author of a recent book Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise blurs the line further by proposing that TV lifestyle gurus are taking over the roles once played by public institutions.
Dr Tania Lewis, a Charles La Trobe Research Fellow in Sociology, says that complex shifts in the social sphere are being played out on television.
Take obesity, for example. In the past, governments saw this as a public health issue. Now, in our era of neo-liberalism, obesity is a matter of individual will power to be aired as entertainment on TV.
Television lifestyle programs tell us how to make over ourselves, our homes and our families. The individual is exhorted – even humiliated – by the TV hosts of such shows as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Biggest Loser, Supernanny, Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation and Honey We're Killing the Kids to take responsibility for their own self-improvement.
'Lifestyle gurus are increasingly intruding on everyday life, directing ordinary people to see themselves as projects that can be made-over through embracing an ethos of relentless selfimprovement,' the sociologist says.
'Smart Living argues that they represent a new form of popular expertise sweeping the world.'
Dr Lewis, a former medical practitioner in NZ who retrained in the humanities specialising in media studies and cultural studies, previously worked at Monash University, the University of Melbourne and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Her book, which has been acclaimed for its insight into the 'social underpinnings of malleable selfhood', is ambivalent about the power now residing in television producers.
'I've interviewed quite a few,' she says, 'and the sense I get is they're not necessarily fully conscious of the values or ideologies that their shows are promoting. Ideas for shows tend to evolve organically – they reflect broader social shifts. You could say they come out of the zeitgeist.'
On the other hand, Dr Lewis is enthusiastic about TV as a medium of the people. Research has shown that viewers are not passive recipients of advice. They argue with hosts, identify emotionally with make-over victims and inundate internet sites with their views.
Dr Lewis is interested in the way television offers us models for social relations. Reality lifestyle shows indicate our preoccupations with identity and selfhood.
'A number of social theorists have commented on the shift in late modernity to an emphasis on the biographical self. An individual is supposed to put all the pieces together.
'The claim is that people don't have communal forms of identity any more. People are untethered. They have to fabricate their own sense of belonging.' Advice television attempts to provide people with new blueprints for selfhood in a 'post-traditional' age. There is also evidence, she says, that TV educates the public in good citizenship and environmental issues.
'Individual consumers are being told they can make a difference and help the community in shows such as Carbon Cops and Cool Aid: The National Carbon Test (aired by Ten last year),' she says. 'It's interesting because TV is rightly criticised for being individualised and commercially–driven. Yet on the other side there is a kind of empowerment of consumers as citizens and a focus on the public good. So TV is a very contradictory beast.'
The book, published by Peter Lang Publishing, tracks the development of lifestyle experts into celebrities and the closing of the gap between the public sphere of commodity production and the private sphere of consumption.
Rhonda Dredge