Reality TV & Entrepreneurial Citizenship after the Financial Crisis
James Hay (University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign)
As Laurie Ouellette and I have suggested in Better Living through Reality TV (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), the “reality-TV” syndrome gained traction in the U.S. through a “neoliberal” reasoning about how supposedly (following the title of Osborne & Gabler’s Reinventing Government) an “entrepreneurial spirit can change the public sector.” During the Bush-Cheney administration, the virtues of an “active,” entrepreneurial citizenship (rather than a “dependency” on the State) deepened, under the banner of what Bush often referred to as an Ownership Society, wherein citizens would take responsibility for their own welfare, and wherein good citizenship would be measured by a citizen’s “enterprise.” As Ouellette and I point out, it was no small coincidence that entrepreneurial citizenship became a political virtue amidst the flourishing of instructional TV programming, that “coached” and “guided” subjects, and provided the resources, for becoming enterprisers. The scope of this programming has been wide in the U.S.–including for instance, financial advice, song-contests such as American Idol, home makeover and investment, car makeover and investment, adventure programs about entrepreneurs such as Lobster Men & Swamp Loggers, pawn shows such as Pawn Stars, “second-hand” collecting programs such as American Pickers, apprenticeship programs such as The Apprentice, chef-contests such as Top Chef, and “pitch”-contests such as Shark Tank. These programs collectively have become integral technically and materially to reality-TV’s mode of production, but the programs also represent the virtues of enterprisers in that mode of production.
My contribution to this conference would examine the legacy of these programs during and after the recent “financial crisis,” addressing how these programs operate differently in TV’s current mode of production than before the financial crisis, how these programs intersect with the flourishing of YouTube following the financial crisis, and how a new regime of “enterprise TV” has emerged through a “post-“ financial crisis reasoning (and contradictions) about paths to “recovery” through enterprising citizens and citizenship.
