Reality out of Technology in Reality TV

摘要

This paper attempts to investigate the idea of "reality" and its relationship with technology being illustrated in a television genre - Reality TV. Many have been studying the reality question of Reality TV and there are generally three ways to think about it: real, not real and hyperreal, as it is indicated in Baudrillard's model of simulation. Reality TV could be considered "real" concerning its "liveness", unreal for its "unnaturalness" of its production process, or even hyperreal for its transportation of the real world on the other side of the screen which marks the imposition of real and its opposite. I suggest that the three ways of thinking Reality TV could be combined to illustrate the complexity of "reality." The representations of "reality" in Reality TV could not be categorized under one of the three thoughts but is problematizing the idea of "reality" itself. It is because in Reality TV, through technological manipulation of the media, there is no way to distinguish the "real world" and the realities represented on screen. The explicit artificiality of the programs could be considered as revealing how realities are made up besides functioning as a label of the "unrealness" of the representations.