Reality programming has altered the landscape of American television over the past decade, ushering in new industrial labor practices, new narrative codes, a heightened interdependence of broadcast and digital platforms, and more “ordinary” forms of celebrity. Informed by but not limited to interviews with various participants, producers, and casters of Reality TV as well as my past ethnographic research on daytime talk shows, this presentation explores the cultural politics of production and performance of ordinariness in a post-network era. Ordinariness both signals a non-professional, non-elite status and indexes qualities such as realness, intimacy, and authenticity. Its materialization on television requires considerable emotional labor, in which the management of feelings, relationships, and other gestures of interpersonal exchange – tacitly understood to be the “natural” purview of women in the private sphere – are bought and sold as an aspect of labor power in the public sphere. Because the management of emotion appears organic to the self and is associated with women/femininity, it tends to be poorly compensated compared to other dimensions of work, making it ideally suited to the neoliberal imperatives of the new media economy.

KOORDINATION
Prof. Dr. Lothar Mikos, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF

Persons

Prof. Dr. Laura Grindstaff is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis (USA). She teaches courses on media, popular culture, cultural sociology, gender and society, and field methods. Her research focuses broadly on American popular culture and its role in constructing gender, race, and class relations. Dr. Grindstaff has published widely on topics ranging from sports to reality television; she is also co-director of the annual Davis Feminist Film Festival. Recent publication (with Susan Murray): “Reality Celebrity: Branded Affect and the Emotion Economy”, Public Culture 27, 1 (2015): 109-135.
Further information sociology.ucdavis.edu/people/grinder

Prof. Dr. Lothar Mikos is Professor of TV-studies at the University for Film Studies KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam-Babelsberg. He is also the managing director of the Erich Pommer Institute for media law, media economy and media research, chair of the expert committee of media at the German Cultural Council (Deutscher Kulturrat) as well as chair of the Television Studies Section of the European society for communication scholars ECREA. His research work concentrates on film and television analysis, the global media market, media convergence processes, production and distribution of television series as well as audience research. Recent publication (with Lea Gamula): Nordic Noir. Skandinavische Fernsehserien und ihr internationaler Erfolg (Konstanz: UVK 2014).

Further information www.mikos-media.de