Lenny.

“Women’s Response to Sex-as-Power Imagery on Popular Reality TV Programming”
Mackenzie A.

Summary:
Discusses the issues where it is impossible to turn on the tv, go to the movies or watches a “so called reality tv show” without encountering sexualizing of women. They discuss the issue where, especially young women get influenced by other women in reality tv-shows express their sexuality; whereas the more confronting you are, the more empowering you become. Overt sex as-power imagery is conceptualized as women’s use of their bodies and sexuality as a primary means of gaining attention, monetary rewards, power and success. This is one of the dominant forms of sexual agency available to women in the mass media and is increasingly prevalent on popular reality TV shows. So, for many girls, relying on media as a sexual guide is an iffy business: media imagery can be disheartening, anxiety-producing, stressful, and disorienting.

Critical view:
It is a collaboration written by women, having their say in how the women in reality tv shows are being conceived. It is a dissertation which points out important and often overseen, or overlooked issues that comes up in reality television show; openly sexual women. Discussed is how audience is looking at the women being empowering and successful by being overly sexual. The biggest issue being brought up is how audiences get influenced, especially young girls to act as the women on the tv shows. They bring up a few good examples; “the girl next door”, which is a tv show about Hugh Hefner’s playmates, and how they reached success by getting their breasts done and strip off in front of the camera. The dissertation is relative in the form where girls/women don’t really realize or think about the consequences of using sex-as-power to get ahead of their career.
Reflection:
I found the dissertation mentioned above to be really helpful as I am writing on the ethical issue when it comes to reality tv. I hadn’t even thought about the gender issue and all of the reality tv shows which is about women who uses/used sex-as-power as a tool to get ahead. I read it and it opened my eyes and made me think in the terms of how the audience gets influenced by reality tv shows, and how often the audience form a relationship with the contestants in the particular show. The dissertation made me investigate further in to the matter, especially being a girl myself, I find it interesting to learn more about how much we really look up to and get influenced by women in reality television shows.

“REMODELING TV TALENT: PARTICIPATION AND PERFORMANCE IN MTV’S REAL WORLD FRANCHISE” By Hugh Phillips Curnutt

Summary:
This dissertation calls attention to the new manner in which reality TV’s representational logic and industrial deployment uniquely situates viewer and participant in a shared space of labour. It all depends on the participant’s performance and the audience’s opinion. He indicates that some of the ways reality TV’s construction of celebrity has altered the economic and performative regimes that have traditionally structured television stardom. He points out how and why the cast in the reality show has been chosen for the particular tv-show.

Critical view:
Hugh is pointing out that we look at reality tv cast as someone who is being their natural selves in an unnatural setting; in front of the camera. He explains that the more natural you seem to be, the more supporters you’ll get from viewers. And it all makes a lot of sense, but then again, for all we know, perhaps the guys working on the post-production got a clear message from the directors to make it look like one is being completely honest, and the other person seem like their nothing but lies and awkwardness. I do think that the more down to earth and “real” you are in front of the camera, the more “real” it becomes for the viewer, even though we know that most of it is set-up, there is still a fine line between it being genuinely than it is being edited to provoke people.
How can I use it? :
It is a good dissertation when it comes to the information about the cast and how they pick the cast out of the crowd. It would definitely fit right in to my case study where I’ll investigate how the tv-shows lure the audience in and make the audience believe in what is being said and done on the tv.

“The People’s Law versus Judge Judy Justice: Two Models of Law in American Reality-Based Courtroom TV” By Steven A. Kohm

Summary:
The essay examines the popular American daytime courtroom programs Judge Judy and People’s Court and comparatively analyzes two distinct models of law and justice developed in these shows. Using the techniques of qualitative media analysis, he argues that Judge Judy represents a shift in the way popular culture imagines the role of law in the lives of ordinary people. This shift accords with neoliberal notions of governance and individual self-responsibility for protection against risk. Conversely, People’s Court represents an older, liberal-legal model of law that emphasizes individual rights, public participation in the court process, and due process. By demonstrating the supersession of Judge Judy justice over that of People’s Court, he argue that this shift in the way law is imagined in American popular culture signals wider shifts in American and indeed international attitudes toward the law in our everyday lives.

Critical view:
In the essay he argues that people now-a day’s look at the television courtroom for legal solutions for their own personal troubles. To suggest that this process is experienced as somehow less real than the actual American legal system is to overlook the significance of reality television in constructing popular legal culture. For viewers of programs such as Judge Judy and People’s Court, these shows provide a window into the civil legal process and a vantage point from which to judge the legal troubles of others and the solutions proposed by the TV judges. Doing my project on rality tv, Judge Judy would be the last show that I would think about being a reality tv-show, I think that h somehow take it all a bit too far. But then again, I do not live in America; perhaps some do rely on the facts coming from the Judge Judy to be actual facts.

How can I use it?:
Even though I love to watch Judge Judy in the afternoons, I am very certain that I won’t be using this essay as a reference in my project. It is not relevant to what I am doing; I thought I might be when I saw the headline, but reading through 1/3 I don’t think it really applies to the reflection of Australian culture.

Reality TV `Fat Camp’ under fire: by Sophie Erlsworth

Summary:
A new fat-fighting reality TV program focusing on childhood obesity is “potentially dangerous”, the Australian Childhood Foundation has claimed. Chief executive Joe Tucci questioned the ethics of showing Teen Fat Camp, which reveals the serious problems faced by six young and obese contestants. They fight dramatic weight problems and travel to the U.S. to take part in the gruelling fat camp in a desperate attempt to shed excess kilograms.

Critical view:
They describe the new reality tv show as “potentially dangerous” and harm full as the contestants/participants in the show is teenagers, not adults like in the biggest looser. They explain how the participants suffer from low self-esteem and seem to be fragile and vulnerable. The short text doesn’t describe much more or go deeper into the issue than just letting us know that it’s mostly ethically wrong.

How can I use it? :
As a show that’s due to come on air later on this year, it won’t do much good for research for the project, even though, just reading about it, it sounds like a worse version of the Biggest Looser, which I’ve already thought about doing my case study on. I will try to get more information about the show “fat camp” to get to bottom of the more extreme weight loss shows, but I am afraid it would be rather hard.

COYOTE UGLY® LIBRARIAN: A PARTICIPANT OBSERVER EXAMINATION OF
KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION IN REALITY TV
Haley K. Holmes, B.A., M.A.

Summary :
Asking one question: how real is reality tv? Reality TV is the most popular genre on television today. According to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by the public, “reality television is a genre of television programming which presents supposedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and features ordinary people instead of professional actors. He is investigating the matter; does it matter if it’s real or not?

Critical view:
The essay goes to the core of reality tv, asking bluntly if it matter if reality tv is real or not. He investigate further into the meaning behind the phrase ‘reality tv’. Holmes pinpoints how audiences want to see ordinary people react to unusual circumstances without the use of scripts, by using a survey he investigate how authentic viewers find reality tv, and concludes with that is must be done more so viewers doesn’t get misinformed.

How can I use it?
Holmes has basically pinpointed the issues I am going to be bringing up in my casestudy; Is reality tv morally and ethically correct for the viewer? Are audiences being misinformed? How real does the audiences really find reality tv? If a tv-show is presented as a reality show, does the audience take is as historical facts? I will be using this article a fair bit for my research in the future.

“Emotional Awerness: Using Reality Television as a Tool for Popular Education” , by Bonnie Maureen Bennet

Summary:
Despite being dismissed as low brow, nonsensical and a cheap form of entertainment, the present cultural phenomenon of reality television reveals a shared space where people are exposing more personalized, emotional aspects of themselves than typically seen in other genres of television programming or areas of contemporary public life. This recent trend of reality TV is both heightening and challenging many of the long-standing ethical debates over the boundaries between public and private, individual and collective as well as rational and emotional experience and needs to be considered within a pedagogical context. The study explored reality television’s position as a means of popular education, while attending to a broader social context of changing media and corresponding cultural shifts.

Critical view:
He/she argues that cheap entertainment as reality tv is challenging the boundaries between public and private, individual and collective, as well as rational and irrational experience. Her thesis explores how the personalised and emotional elements of reality television programming offer ordinary people an opportunity to externalise their personal self and emotional experiences in the public realm. The thesis is well argued and written. Her arguments are well supported by her references, and she really points out how participants and audiences are to a degree being fooled by the authenticity of reality tv.

How can I use it?
Focusing on “relationships” between participants and viewers, I think the thesis will come in good hand. As she explains, there is some invisible “bond” between participants and viewers; participants giving the viewers what they think they want and need, and viewers forming a relationship to the participant, whether good or bad.

“The rhetoric of the real: Audience responses to reality-based television”
Getz, Glenn Charles

Summary:
This study investigates the meanings of reality-based television programming, shows that depend on the characters, conflicts, and drama of actual events to fascinate, horrify, titillate, and entertain audiences. Employing approaches from rhetorical and cultural studies, the thesis examines the definition of this form of vernacular culture and identifies two different types of reality-based programs: the re-enactment show and the actuality show. The study attempts to bring cultural approaches into rhetorical scholarship by arguing that a theory centred on reception will be beneficial. It is argued that rhetoricians of past and present often neglect audiences by ignoring, redefining, or constructing them without reference to how they actually experience messages.

Critical view:
Argues that News-Tv used to be able to compete with any other television show broadcasted during the tv prime time. But reality-tv programs have ‘become staple food for American television consumption’ His research and comparison between reality based tv and actual factual shows is through and shows how the audience somehow have mixed up the two of them.

How can I use it?
Again, I am focusing on the audience reception of reality tv, but I am not quite sure if this is the path I want to choose. Maybe if I can angle it the way that I can further investigate on the matter how the producers choose to produce their reality shows the article could be a good source for material.

This semester of integrated media made more and more sense as I went along with it. I am normally pretty confused the first half of a course and then the bits and pieces seem to fall in place. I have learnt how to use online platforms to my advantage. I found a platform that suits perfectly fine to call my ID hub, and I figured how to use the other platforms to represent myself in different ways; I started off by using glos.si as my id hub, and I still do. But I came to realize that it was a lot more personal feed than professional, so I made an account on soundcloud and soon all of my audio started feeding on to my glos.si profile. I appreciate how glos.si combines both professional and personal media, as I think it’s important to show your personal and creative side along with the professional works, and the way glos.si turns it into somewhat of a magazine really appeals to me. Now my glos.si profile show my vimeo videos, my soundcloud audio, my tweets from twitter and photos from Instagram. I have also a link to my wordpress blog, where all my writing gets done. So glos.si is for me perfect as a hub where basically my whole persona is shown; even my quirky nonsense statuses from facebook which adds a little touch of charisma( or at least I think so) Before doing this course I wouldn’t have a clue about how to combine any of the different platforms and actually how to use it. Less did I know the importance of having an online personal and professional representation. The online life is bigger and easier and I think it’s important to know exactly how to integrate in to that online world. Take ABC-pool for example. It is such a good platform to use if you want to contribute to any projects or if you need people to contribute to yours. It is such an easy way to make a call-out, and users of ABC-pool actually seem to want to contribute. I still find ABC-pool to be a tad scary; I managed to upload all of my different project, or at least the ones I find worthy enough to be uploaded as it is intimidating to show you works to other professionals. But after a little while I got a hang of it and sort of let go of the fear of other criticise my work and started contributing to other projects; I uploaded a few texts to a project called ‘a letter’, and a few photographs that I took during my ‘writing with media’ course. And thinking about it now, it is something that I wouldn’t mind keep doing; contributing to other projects, whether they end up using it or not, it is great for practice and something different to add to my online portfolio. I also think there is something magical around the whole ABC-pool community as they are all in it together. They all seem to be helping each other out in one way or another, and I would love to be an integrated part of that community, therefore, I am going to continue using ABC-pool as much as possible, and contribute as much as possible.
Working on the participatory project I also realized that there actually are people out there wanting to contribute. I’m sad to say when friends at different uni’s ask me to contribute on surveys or other contribution projects I often seem to ignore it, so I did not have much hope in human kind when we first started off. We had a call out on a few different forums, which did not give us too much, but at least there were total strangers willing to give us a hand and share their transport stories. And just by making the project profile on ABC-pool; the day after we had a few followers and one contribution, which I find amazing, no nagging, no hassle, someone found the project interesting and relatable enough to contribute right away. As our project did not need a specific audience it was easy for people to relate and share their stories.
To keep the occupy and imagine project going, I saw the importance of the knowledge we got in the first half of the semester. We knew what platforms we could use and what sort of audience there was on these specific platforms. First off we discussed who might be able to relate and share their stories that had significance to our project, and then figure out which platform they likely would be using.
I think I have had a huge eye-opener when it comes to ABC-pool. It is its own little community wanting to help out in every way they can, all you have to do is to upload your project, add a little description, and make a call out. If we were to ever to a similar project as the participatory project I would’ve used ABC-pool straight away.
What I can take with me from the integrated media course is the knowledge of how to represent myself online, in different projects I would know how to pick my audience after the platform, as you find different audience on different platforms and how to do a call-out and make people intrigued and interested in participating and contributing to the project. And to always keep my online identity and projects in mind, and not worry too much about platforms, as long as one get contributions that one can use and relates to the project, it doesn’t really matter which platforms they get contributed on.

Reflection and dwelling #2, or perhaps it is #1002. I dwell upon a lot, often it seems.
So far, this semester of integrated media has turned out to be completely different from last semester. In last semester we focused more on how to use our eyes in everyday life to spot content and meaning behind things we see every day but don’t really notice. We made a bunch of sketch videos and learned how to better use different editing software for post-production, the videos we mad was later to be used in a bigger picture- korsakow. We talked about narratives and discussed how the narrative differs from types of audience. We also learned how to see our own signature in our photos, effects of details that reappeared in every video, even though the themes we got given was different for every week. So I guess, after learning slightly a bit more about whom you really are it was appropriate to go to the next step, how to represent ourselves and show off who we are online. Even though I don’t want to pursue making videos later on in my professional career, I don’t feel as if last semester was a waste of any kind. I did manage to produce products that can be presented on line, and be a part of my portfolio later on. This semester so far, has been focused on how to put youreself out there; on line, and all the different ways of ‘integrate’ the different types of networks on line. I have myself been presented to a few new and surprisingly interesting and efficient networks. I have to admit, I have never really been the type of person who use the internet to try to sell my-self, my ideas or my work. I am not the type who updates my facebook status every day, not even every month! I guess I am more the pen and paper sort of gal. Then I started out pursuing the on-line life with my raws blog, basically where I ended up doing all my writing. As it turns out, I love to blog. I love ramble on about everything and nothing. And so far the raws blog has done nothing but good to me. I have come to realise how important and how effective it is to use internet and networks as a tool to present myself. After signing up to twitter, which was a terrifying for some weird reason, I figured that following people who inspire you, interest you and encourage you can help you go a long way. To network with strangers who knows the business and can help you answer queries you might have is amazing, it is an amazing tool to learn and experience more. And when I got my first follower on twitter, I was both excited and proud, and I did think to myself; this is not that bad at all. I got my first (and only) follower through my all-time favourite musician/blogger Lykke Li. I also got my first feedback comment on twitter yesterday, a comment from glos.si telling me that my videos from vimeo looked great on my glos.si profile. And even though glos.si probably give all their ‘participants’ a good old clap on their backs it was a kick in the butt, to keep going. Glos.si also turned out surprisingly useful, as it combines all my different networking spaces, besides my blog, which I find a tad annoying, but it works great as a ID HUB as soon as I get more active on both vimeo and twitter, because as it is now, there is a bit too much content from facebook, which is more personal than professional.
ABC Pool, which is mandatory to sign on to turned in the start to be a big hassle, nor did I know what to post on to my projects, as I don’t know what there is that I feel a hundred per cent completely happy with and comfortable to show off yet. For some reason ABC Pool seem to intimidate me slightly, but I did come around eventually, probably because I had to, and started contributing to other peoples’ projects more than showing off my own. And so far it has been really good, at the moment I am working on a little piece for a guy asking for people to write personal letters, it can be a letter to anyone and anyone, and it is that sort of writing that I love. So I am coming to terms with ABC Pools as well to be a network that can be extremely useful if you just investigate it and get in to it with the right mind set.
Is it very hard to get in to a new network on-line. Maybe it is just me, but I need to feel comfortable straight away, and if I don’t I can easily just drop it. It is a bad habit, but I feel that I have been open to it throughout this semester because I have come to terms with the fact that it is necessary for me to do, if I at all want end up working as a professional in this area and to earn some ‘moneycitas’ in my future life.
Up to this point, halfway through the semester, I think the most valuable thing I have learnt is who I am, and who I want to be as a professional. I haven’t necessary figured out exactly what I want to end up working as and with, but at least I know that I am a creative person, a writer that writes from her heart, a writer that got a voice as well- on the radio, and I can make good short cut videos. And I am slowly starting to figure out how to ‘sell’ it, how to represent myself, and because I do have a few different areas that I particularly like and can do, I now know how to present all of them, and collect them in to one single portfolio- my id hub.
So I will be continuing writing, tweeting and updating whatever that is necessary for me to earn my spot in the on-line community.

woho.
I actually ended up there, in that weird social media community. im pretty new to the whole idea and tricks behind it,. but i will, i will do my best to get my hands dirty and learn the in’s and out’s.

heres me.
https://twitter.com/LennyLeonora

Ok here we go again.

Last uni week is coming up, and so is all the good old assignments. hallelujah.
our rythmical group ballet mecanique is working hard to get the final korsokow project finished and perfect, which I find very difficult,due to extremely different personalities stuck in one single group, where we all want different outcomes of the final project.
But so far so good, even though in the end I wouldn’t have mind doing it individually,. oh well. we have progressed alot, with the theme, material, responsibilities, interface and other cosmetic eras.again;so far so good!

other than that, everything is going swell, this semester is almost over and i get to travel home to good old norway for a holiday, and i cannot wait! Im going to eat all my mother’s boring,everyday norwegian food, i miss her boring food oh so much. you wouldnt have any idea. its not even boring anymore, now it seems way exotic and rare than it ever has.., Bring on the potatoes, meatballs, fishballs, spaghetti, more potatoes and carrots, fishes; alot of fishes.yumm.
Im going to get fatter and fatter by every day, because all i want to do when i get back home is to eat all this now exotic foods,the cheese-doodles, chocolate milk, and drink overly expensive wines and other alcohols,. now thats what i call holidays! Im way too excited. i might even have time in between my feeding time to visit my friends in various cities, travel to our summerhouse and go fishing with my dad and uncle, eat delisciouso shrimps an self catched fishes and have some pretty hectic nights out with my longtime bestfriend. (they always en up with the weirdest events, but i wont go in to that.)
Anywho, all i have to do before this time of happiness and joy arrives is to finish up some major essays, other assignments, purchase a heap of sleeping pills and check in to the worlds most longest and redicolous flight.

Here is the URL to my Korsakow film.

http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3276570/journey/