Now Casting: The Emotion Economy of Reality TV

• In Event: 034 - Regular Session. Media Sociology: Mass Media and Popular Culture

Abstract

This paper examines what is specific to the forms of celebrity generated within the reality television context: its capacity to index “the Real” via the emotional expressiveness of ordinary people, and to commodify/brand this expressiveness as signifier of the genre. The context is a large and growing cultural infrastructure devoted to mining, producing, and ultimately branding emotional expressiveness. This infrastructure is part of an emerging cultural formation – what I am calling the “emotion economy” -- in which the body and its emotions are the conduit to media visibility and (potential) fame. The emotion economy is the cultural infrastructure devoted to the production and promotion of emotion/affect within the reality television universe: the array of texts and practices, both formal and informal, that elicit, guide, shape, institutionalize, and commodify/brand emotion -- including casting calls, trainings and workshops, instructional videos, and off-screen prepping and coaching. Brandability, as a prerequisite for celebrity, depends in part on the type of “ordinariness” embodied by reality-TV participants and the generic traditions they represent, as well as the differential access to the tools and resources (material and otherwise) of self-promotion. The emotion economy helps cultivate brand-potential (the potential for celebrity), and brand-potential feeds back into the emotion economy, informing its logic and purpose.

Author

• Laura Grindstaff, University of California-Davis