Jersey Shore and Subculture

Youth subcultures have always fascinated the mainstream. If reality TV had existed back in the 1950s and ’60s in the days of greasers, teddy boys, mods, rockers, hippies and skinheads, surely some enterprising someone would have pointed a camera at those crazy kids with their curious fashion. 

We did get peeks via films starring James Dean and Marlon Brando, which were praised for their realism and decried for ruining impressionable youth. Kind of like Jersey Shore. The breakout MTV series, although on a new shore, since its cast has become infamous tabloid fixtures, gave us a glimpse of the strange and little-seen subculture of Urban Italians. It wasn’t an anthropological documentary, per se, just an MTV camera crew following a bunch of young, sexed-up, worked-out and super-tanned Italianish-Americans with the greatest set of nicknames in the history of nicknaming (Snooki, JWoww and The Situation are justification alone for the show’s existence). Here is definitely a reality television subculture, and the networks seem to exploit them. As it states in the textbook, “ As we have seen, the way in which subcultures are represented in the media makes them both more and less exotic than they actually are” (p 357).  I feel that even though this type of subculture as exposed on Jersey Shore, it has elements about looking a certain way as the guys and gals do on this show. Really buff, greasy black hair, too tan, and that accent. It seems to be a trend in to look, speak, and act this way in order to be considered part of the Guido culture. So, why do these folks have big muscles? I’ll tell you, even though you already know, because if they had to rely on their wit and intellect, they probably wouldn’t receive half as much attention that this show and these people are getting. But you know what’s scarier? These folks aren’t acting at all; they’re actually being themselves. Since we enjoy this type of programming so much, why not overload us with as many reality shows that we can tolerate? This has also caused another subculture. These are the ones that don’t understand the subculture and fail to realize what the allure to these types of shows is, they prefer to go out and live instead of watch others do that. However, there will always be viewers, such as myself, who will glue themselves to a reality TV series like Jersey Shore and ponder upon how such subcultures became part of popular culture.  

Reality as a Spectacle

As I read in Debord’s essay, “Commodity as a Spectacle,” #42 caught my attention. “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life” (p 111). What I took from this is that entertainment and reality television has taken a toll on most of our lives where we can’t even sit through commercial breaks. So, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the link between commoditization and convenience.  Hulu and the DVR enable me to watch a TV show pretty much whenever I want to.  This works well for me when I want to watch reality TV like Jersey Shore and Real Housewives of New Jersey.  The added benefit is there are limited commercial breaks and if I get bored I can fast forward to the scenes that interest me and then throw the episode away like a discarded Kleenex. It makes me feel as though I can skip a show without feeling like I missed anything major.
Another example of the effect of commoditization of entertainment can be seen in the spread of Redbox Kiosks and the correlation in the downturn of DVD sales.  At over thousands of kiosks in the US, you can rent a movie for as little as a $1.  The amount of movies available at the theatre, cable, on demand, via the internet, and on DVD add difficultly to the idea of shelling out $10 to own the DVD or even more to see the movie in the theater.

A lot of people have been poo-pooing the very short seasons and the pre-packaged timeline of Lost (we all know when the series ends).  But I’ve found the added anticipation of having to wait for the season to begin combined with the fact the show is ending after this season has made it that much easier to make a weekly event of watching the show with my friends.  Going back to the DVRs and Hulu, these companies who make these kinds of products or websites to be able to watch your favorite reality TV show without any commercials are “all sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued” (p 111).  

Fetishism/Reality TV

In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things—that is commodities and money. Commodity fetishism is not unique to capitalist societies, since commodity trade has occurred in one way or another for thousands of years; but in Marx's opinion, commodity fetishism became pervasive especially in capitalist society, because this kind of society is based almost totally on the "production of commodities by means of commodities". That means that market relationships influence almost everything that people do, something which was not the case in pre-capitalist societies, where commerce was much more restricted. Reality TV represents, among other things, the triumph of the market, the notion that everyone as well as everything has its price and that people will do pretty much anything for money.  Real Housewives of New Jersey will let cameras into their personal lives and even their children’s lives for the sake of fame and money. To me, no matter how much they talk on their reunion shows that their families are “as thick as sleeves” (Caroline Manzo on Real Housewives of New Jersey), they wouldn’t do it if they weren’t getting any money out of this. I’ve seen t-shirts being sold stating things like “Real Housewives of Bedrock” which is from the Flinstones cartoon show advertising the two wives on that cartoon show as something that could be seen as a reality tv product.  As the book states, “It is is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquires, as values, one uniform social status, distinct form their varied forms of existence as objects of utility” (p 90-91). Reality TV enjoys an unusual labor situation in which participants line up in their thousands in an attempt to work for free, with only a slim chance of a monetary reward. This expenditure on the producers' part amounts to only a fraction of the income which  the shows generate: even Survivor's grand prize of $1 million is what the network recoups in about one minute of advertising. Meanwhile, there is no need to pay professional writers, actors, or many other forms of support staff. Reality TV series are also fairly low-risk. However, there wouldn’t be so much hype and high ratings if it wasn’t for people who “bought” into these shows. 

The Masses and Cultural Industry in Reality TV

As described in our textbook, the term masses is a very “complex word in social description.” We can use this term to describe the majority of the people, by the people, and for the people. These “working-class” or ordinary people have been drawn into the reality television world by default. I feel the masses are what brought reality television to life rather than producers or agents looking for weird, awkward, angry, and bold people to be put in one room to see how long they can tolerate each other.  However reality television began, slowly we start paying attention to shows such as, Jersey Shore, The Bachelor, and Real Housewives of New York. How many times have you sat down in front of your TV? Set and start flipping channels to only come across a show like The Bad Girls Club on Oxygen and watch how a bunch of angry, neglected, insecure, oppressed in some ways (in my eyes), and boy crazy young women put in a beautiful house with no form of technology and only each other to keep themselves company? Absurd, right? You wouldn’t watch that kind of garbage, correct? Well, I found myself saying the same thing while watching a whole season of it! It’s amazing how the “common people” are ashamed and blown away at how much stupidity and anger a person is displaying on TV for us to watch; yet, we watch it!! I believe ordinary people may watch such shows in order to either get away from their own “reality” and ponder upon how much they now appreciate their life rather than being on national television making a fool of themselves. Others focus on ordinary people engaging in common activities such as dating or home redecorating. In both instances, viewers are given the chance to compare and contrast their own lives with those of the shows' protagonists.  The resulting experience is a complexly constructed and highly individualized. That viewers may be drawn by the chance to mentally "test" their behavior against that of the actual participants contrasts with the common criticism of reality TV viewers as passive voyeurs. The terms “mass deception” and “social control” seems to most accurately describe the ideas and theories that Adorno earnestly prescribe. Adorno re-iterated the understanding of the culture industry by suggesting that a dominant ideology has surfaced socially due to the capitalist movement, which has transformed “art” into a business and commercialized product.  While watching shows such as, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, in between the shows the network advertises the clothing, jewelry, and accessories that we see the “The Real Housewives” wear during the show. These networks have their own websites, and every time someone visits their page, they make tons of money. Let alone the merchandise, if you even wanted to blog on their webpage for free, they are still finding ways to make profit out of our opinions and thoughts about the show, which are meaningless and all the industry sees are dollar signs.