Television culture and the myth of participation

The past decades have witnessed an increasing visibility of ‘ordinary’ people in the media, partly through the proliferation of – often controversial – formats based on ‘true’ experiences and emotions of non-professional participants. This development, with all its incarnations, has resulted in important theoretical  debates, yet empirical research into the actual experiences of taking part in production processes is relatively scarce: critical evaluations of reality programmes, for instance, are still  predominantly based on the analysis of media representations.

In contrast with this text based tradition, this project follows a decentred, practice-oriented approach (Morley, 2009; Couldry, 2012), asking what people do with media participation and under what conditions, what the regularities are and how agency is constructed and negotiated. Building on the concept of ‘media ritual’ (Couldry, 2013), the research seeks to explore how the perception of media institutions as centres of value production are naturalized and reaffirmed when ordinary people become part of media productions, and how media participation is used as a ritual strategy by the participants for ordering their everyday life. Empirically, the research presents in-depth production ethnographies, based on interviews with producers and participants of controversial television formats, which, while addressing and confronting the audience with existential and socially pressing issues, also suggest a gradual integration of ‘social media logic’ and its premise to provide voice to ordinary people into the existing mass media logic of (public) broadcasting.

The academic contribution of the project is manifold. To begin with, research into the ‘behind the scenes’ processes of media productions is scarce. By ethnographically tracking the experiences of particular groups of participants of television programmes, the research aims to move beyond the dominant discourse of empowerment versus exploitation, and deliver contextualized accounts of how participation as value and as strategy is tied into notions and experiences of selfhood, agency and the sense of being connected to the social world. Furthermore, and more broadly, the project addresses how the symbolic power of central media is being reaffirmed, challenged or refigured under the current era of ‘participatory’ media culture, where the traditional boundaries between media consumption and production, between what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the media seem to become increasingly blurred.