Congrats to Rachel on her most recent piece in Communication Theory (Surveillance on Reality Television and Facebook: From Authenticity to Flowing Data). She did a guest lecture about reality TV and the Bachelor/Bachelorette in a class I took with Carrie Rentschler a few years back. I'm not a fan of the show (or the genre, really) but she gave me new ways to think about it. I think her analysis only gets stronger as she integrates her thoughts on social media, which is what this article's about. The abstract is below, but here's the kicker: "On Facebook, the significance of putting out data is highlighted, with little attention to the content of the data or to reception [...] This is freedom of expression in its simplest form: Put out bits of information, as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Any response to the data will do, as long as the information has been noticed, in some way, by someone, because noticing the information is important as a means of further circulating the information down the page, although the content of the response has no particular impact on the movement of data."
Aligning reality TV (RTV) with social networking sites (SNSs) enables the development of a geneology in the use of surveillance for displays of the self. By moving from “older” media such as TV to “newer” such as SNSs, we gain insight into how issues at stake for critical scholars studying surveillance practices shift when the spaces (and practices) of surveillance change. We bring into conversation work in surveillance studies, critical media studies, RTV, and new media, emphasizing the necessity of seeing connections between types of surveilled subjectivity in popular media as these contribute to a larger ethos about surveillance, subjectivity, data, and our engagement with the world. We suggest that Facebook brackets practices for synthesizing the contextualizing.
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