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James Walcott's In The Voyeurism Of Reality TV

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American critic James Wolcott once said “In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer 's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.”

Welcome to my first blog post, in this post I plan to focus mainly on reality TV and how emotion plays such an important part within our role as audience members. James Walcott describes perfectly my idea of reality TV and how accepting our society is when it comes to consuming this genre of television. For my last seminar we were required to read a text by William Brown, I found this article intriguing due to his idea of “personae” which I felt goes hand in hand with reality TV. He also describes four different process when it comes to our media …show more content…
There is one process which I find myself falling into when watching enjoyable reality TV shows, this being transportation which will be explored through two completely different reality TV shows. Transportation is defined by William Brown as being “the process of becoming wholly absorbed into a narrative during media consumption or through participation in a mediated event”. The two reality tv shows which I feel will be most intriguing to explore are, Extreme Makeover and Fear Factor, growing up I remember these two TV shows were a favourite of mine when they were aired along with 7th Heaven but we wont go into that today.

Extreme Makeover:

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Ok, so I 'm pretty sure everyone has seen at least one episode of Extreme

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