Ideas - A Reality Check on Reality TV

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Twenty-five years ago, reality TV exploded in popularity, and the media panicked. But could shows like Love Is Blind and their like actually help make us more media literate? IDEAS examines the culture, morality, and philosophy of unscripted television. *This episode originally aired on May 6, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Okay, alright.

Okay, ready to go? Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Try it more like, welcome to Ideas. When Matthew asked me to record this script today, I was already feeling tense. We've got deadlines, we've got meetings. Things are piling up.

And let's face it, his writing can be a little dramatic. When Nala said my writing was dramatic, I was incensed. I was perturbed. I nearly had to cancel my spray tan appointment. I was so apoplectic. spray tan appointment, I was so apoplectic. Yes, this is Ideas. And no, we're not launching our own backstage docudrama. But we are about to explore the cultural phenomenon of reality TV.

Nearly 25 years ago, reality shows exploded in popularity. They changed television, redefined celebrity, and provoked several rounds of cultural anxiety. So how real is most reality? TV will take a look. Plus, see how reality TV's realness is coming under fire. How real, by the way, is reality TV? We never go, oh yeah, let's give this person a villain edit. But we absolutely knew what they meant. We're aware of how things are mediated in our own lives.

It comes together as something that feels very real and something that does provide a rich human experience. Reality TV is also, in opposition to its title, often criticized as fake. But really, what isn't? In this episode, Matthew Lazenrider examines the morality, philosophy, and unreality of reality television. This is Reality Check. This is Reality Check. Over the past 25 years or so, many TV critics, newspaper columnists, and cultural commentators have worried about the effect of reality TV on viewers.

Will it lower our standards of entertainment? Will it make us shallow and vain? Will it diminish our ability to tell fact from fiction? I'll tell you what it made me in the pandemic winter of 2020. Hungry. You know that muffin mix is absolutely delicious. It really is. I mean, they look hideous, but they taste amazing.

Reality TV, or unscripted television, is a big genre. It covers docu-soaps like Real Housewives, dating shows like The Bachelor, and cooking competitions like MasterChef and, my personal favourite, The Great British Baking Show. They were piped. Yes, they were piped, Paul, with love. They looked like they'd been dropped from about Baking Show. They were piped. Yes, they were piped, Paul. They looked like they'd been dropped from about five foot up. All right, mate.

During the long, dark days of early pandemic, I watched a lot of Bake Off. I binged all the seasons, threw all the cast changes. Prue Leith replaced Mary Berry, and then Noel Fielding and Sandy Toksvig replaced Mel and Sue. And pretty soon, Matt Lucas took over from Sandy, Peter made that bonkers Bake Off bubble cake, and then I, I was out of Bake Offs to watch. So I turned to Love is Blind, watched a couple seasons of that. That was fun. And before you know it, it was 2023, and Scandival was all over the news, and I was ready to dive in. But no matter how many times this has been talked about, there's still a sense that watching Vanderpump or Housewives or whatever

is somehow wrong, that it's bad for us. Reality TV has been here to stay, and I think in the past only five years or so, I would say, it has gotten a lot more popular. This is Tom Syverson. He is a writer from Brooklyn. He's written about entertainment, politics, and culture for sites like Paste, Quartz, and Brooklyn Magazine. like Paste, Quartz, and Brooklyn Magazine. He is also the author of Reality Squared, a book about the collision of politics, philosophy, and reality TV. One of the first questions I ask is,

do you watch reality TV? Like, that's the first thing I want to know about a person. And they're often a little bit taken aback and they're often like, well, not really, but, you know, I've seen this show or that show. But then I launch into it and I start talking about everything I'm watching and what I think of it. And then they launch into it. And it turns out they're a huge fan. But they were just a little bit reticent to reveal it.

You know that it's just a show and that it's kind of put together by producers. But it's still very real in this sense that you can't get over. And it's not because you're ignorant of the facts. You know that it's a show produced by a giant television company. And yet it's creating something true. It's simulating some sort of truth that speaks to people. Good evening. Thanks for joining us. I'm Andrew Dimbert. We begin tonight with an affair. There was a bit of a scandal, I guess. I don't know. Somebody.

Scandival, I think is what they call it. Yes, I believe it's called Scandival. For fans and even the cast of the popular show Vanderpump Rules, there will forever be two realities. One before and now one after Scandival. Hashtag Scandival racking up more than 146 million views on TikTok alone. Can reality TV get any more dramatic than Scandaval? Scandaval, oh, a gift from God.

Hey, you love all that stuff. We love it, we love it. That's some media coverage of 2023's Scandaval, the name given to an incident on a Bravo show called Vanderpump Rules. The term Scandaval is a mix of Scandal and Sandoval, Tom Sandoval being a longtime cast member on the show. The Scandal was Tom was cheating on his longtime girlfriend Ariana with her friend Raquel. All of them were already part of this reality show, meaning this affair was going on behind the scenes of a show that was

supposed to take you behind the scenes. In a way, Tom Sandoval wasn't just cheating on Ariana, he was cheating on the audience. Vanderpump is the kind of show that TV critics used to hate, a low-stakes gossip-based peer into the purported private lives of hot people, gossip-based peer into the purported private lives of hot people. And the fun is judging their ethics and morals. I got started on that in some of its very early seasons, and I've watched it pretty faithfully. But yeah, it puts us in this inherently ambiguous moral situation because we are dealing with real people, or they're at least a form of real or a form of half real, half fictional that is different than a fully fictional character. In something like Breaking Bad, you know, like the anti-hero nature of Walter White or the morality play of it is,

of course, a big part of the storyline, but it's still kind of handed to you like that. And once the story ends, it's over. Whereas even when dealing with reality TV stars, they're human beings, the story is not over until they die. And human beings are endlessly interpretable and reinterpretable. And there's just always another layer to a human being, always another backstory that nobody knows about yet, always the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. People have known for a long time that reality TV is curated, narratives are produced, storylines are concocted. TV is curated. Narratives are produced. Storylines are concocted. But part of what made Scandival such a big deal for viewers is that it collapsed multiple layers of reality. After Scandival broke, all of a sudden this curated drama was about real things. And all of the construct of it, the producers and editing and presence of the cameras, all got pulled into the fiasco.

I want to talk to her like, I don't want a camera in my face. We will, we will. You're not understanding. You're saying that you want to talk to her off camera. That's Tom Sandoval arguing with a producer about what stays on camera and what doesn't. Did you have any inkling that there was anything brewing? Another cast member interviewed a producer about what they knew when. I just came over to make peace. I don't want peace. Another cast member interviewed a producer about what they knew when.

And people confronted each other on whether they'd ever been genuine or everything was an act for the cameras. And it is kind of difficult to tell what's real and what's manufactured. Reality kind of yearns to break free into this reality show. And it does reveal something about the way we interpret and consume and analyze media today. 16 real castaways, 39 days, $1 million. Who will be the ultimate survivor? Survivor comes to CBS beginning May 31st. Even before Survivor and the explosion in unscripted television, there were concerns that reality TV was harming society. Of course, the definition of reality TV has changed a bit.

Before Survivor, when people in Canadian newspapers said reality TV, they meant stuff like this. Everything you're about to see is real. Tonight, go undercover as we capture the final hours of freedom for two of America's most wanted. Rescue 911, sponsored by the Dallas Assumption. He's the helter-skelter murderer who is doing life, but Charlie has changed his tune. Cops is filmed on location as it happens. 1990s television was full of those kinds of shows. Clips, reenactments, caught on camera, that kind of thing. Newspaper columnists lamented that reality TV would dumb us all down and inure us to the violence in the world. Lurid programs stop channel surfers in their tracks.

In the Toronto Star, December of 1996. Reality TV, gun battles, high-speed collisions, street brawls, all the wonder and horror of human existence captured on tape by some low-rent voyeur with a handycam. When word got out about a new show coming called Survivor, TV columnists feared the worst. For all its obscene extremes, Survivor will satisfy the voyeur in many of us for whom the current glut of shows chronicling life's most stressful events has only been an appetizer. This is the Edmonton Journal, December of 1999. Sickening, shocking, indecent, vulgar. It's a guaranteed recipe for success.

Survivor finally made it to air in 2000, and we all learned that it was really rather tame. Except maybe for the rat eating part. And concerns about violence in reality TV turned into concerns about something else, tastelessness. So there you have it. Tens of millions of sickos watching a handful of sickos as they make and break deals, laugh, weep, flirt, squabble, plot, moan, whine, curse, snore, burp, sweat, scratch, and eat rats. And, oh joy, right in the comfort of our own living rooms, while peering through the keyholes that our TV screens have become. screens have become. That earlier version of reality TV was aimed at men and critics worried about its effect on men. As reality TV evolved and became associated with women, of course, critics and news shows worried about its effect on women. Well, everyone always thinks that media affects other people and not me, right?

Most when you ask people, you know, are you influenced by advertising? They'll say, well, I'm not, but I know that other people really are. Erin Myers is an associate professor of communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is also the author of Extraordinarily Ordinary, Us Weekly, and The Rise of Reality Television Celebrity. She is also a reality TV viewer. Well, I remember as a teenager looking at the real world and thinking like,

oh, this is what it's going to be like when I grow up and I get to be cool and move out of my parents' house. But something like Survivor, I remember watching for the game aspect and watching this sort of unfolding of human emotion and human behavior. And then Teen Mom has long been my favorite. And I really, in some ways, I can't really say exactly why I like it, which I think a lot of people would find themselves in that condition. Teen Mom is a spinoff of the show 16 and Pregnant, which first aired in 2009. And that show is an interesting example of the relationship between reality TV and the news media. It seems to almost be glorified that it's okay to be a teen, to be pregnant, to be single, and that there

are a lot of adventures that go along with it. Certainly with the teen mom phenomenon, there was a lot of discourse that girls are just going to try and get pregnant so they can get on this show. Are girls having babies to have TV fame? Critics say teen pregnancy has even created reality stars with a glut of shows like 16 and pregnant from mtv reality shows to bristol palin's baby bump teen pregnancy is quickly becoming a pop culture trend we do hear stories of young girls trying to become pregnant so they can perhaps one day be on television you know these success stories sort of glorify the hardships of being a teen mom but actually there were studies that were done out of the University of Indiana that found that that was not true.

And that girls that watch the show with their parents were more likely then to talk about things like safe sex and healthy relationships and things like that. Teen pregnancy rates in the United States were already in steep decline when 16 and pregnant aired. And if you look at the data, it declined even faster almost immediately after it was released. If you're going to argue something, it's easier to argue that reality TV led to fewer teen pregnancies. That doesn't get as much play as the concern of they're just all going to get pregnant to get on TV because being famous is all they care about. So I think audiences have always been more nuanced than that. But there's a lot of moral panic around feminized texts as a bad influence on young women. You know, any sort of idea of women being obsessed with Hollywood and try to become an actress back

in, say, the golden age of Hollywood days. Soap operas, just making women want to stay home and eat bonbons and not do anything. We have, you know, romance novels are just trashy things that are filling women's heads with these bad ideas about relationships. I think any kind of feminized text that you can think of has some sort of tie back to some concern that it's a bad influence, even as many of them are reinforcing, you know, dominant norms or stereotypes about femininity that might be what the critics are supporting anyway, but just a sense that when women like things, it becomes kind of troubling. Boy bands, even back to Beatlemania, right? The idea that, oh, they're too into this. There's going to be something wrong with their enjoyment of it.

An interesting twist in the history of reality TV literacy is that while cable news was worrying about the effect of reality TV on viewers, viewers were becoming so sensitive to how these shows are put together, the editing, the construction, the scripting, that it was viewers that changed reality TV. I think there's been a shift, and this is something I want to investigate more and see if I can figure out exactly when this happened. I don't think it would be a specific moment, but I look at things like The Hills on MTV, which was very popular. Hi, I'm Lauren. I grew up in Laguna Beach, a small town with big drama.

But now it's time for me to move on. The Hills started with a pretty standard reality show setup. But over time, viewers found that something was just off. The camera work was too good, the lighting too perfect, the performances a little acty, and the storylines a little too dramatic. I can't believe this is really goodbye. In the very last episode, on again, off again, Kristen Cavallari and Brody Jenner have a tearful final goodbye,

and she gets in a car to drive away to the airport to begin life anew in Europe, leaving Brody standing as the sun sets over the Hollywood Hills. Brody standing as the sun sets over the Hollywood Hills. But then crew members come in and roll away that Hollywood Hills backdrop. And there's Brody standing in a studio backlot. Kristen parked about five feet away as crew take down all the rigging and lights and everyone calls it a day. It's a real wink to the audience that you knew the whole time. And we're just showing you that, of course, this is all constructed. And then we've seen it in other shows. The Real Housewives started to bring in discourses of what they were saying about each other in the tabloids. so aware of the fact that it's constructed, that to leave it out would actually threaten the reality of the show, so to speak. And I think that has to do with also that we are making media every day, right? When we post on our Instagrams and Facebook and all that kind of thing,

we're aware of how things are mediated in our own lives. And I think there's been a lot of talk, both hopefully at schools, but also in general discourse about media construction and media framing, everything from entertainment shows to including, you know, news reporting and things like that. I wouldn't say we're a fully media literate society. Certainly, I would not say that. But that there is a greater awareness of the construction of media. And that, again, becomes part of the fun is if this is supposed to be real, how am I able to see the moments where the construction is happening? It's no secret that reality is mediated on television, news, radio, podcasts. I mean, that's why they call it the media.

I mean, I'm mediating reality right now. Not just through the clips I choose to play, but who I choose to speak with and not, what gets left in, what gets taken out. There is a shared vocabulary. There's shared techniques and resources that are used across all of the media. Dave Moses is a television producer and writer. I've done The Real Housewives of Toronto. For documentary, I've done Paramedics, Life on the Line.

And for a palate cleanser, I did Tricked, a show about a magician doing magic tricks for people. Dave and I spoke for about 50 minutes and I'm going to use about five. There's no news. There is no scripted. There's no unscripted. There's no documentary that is not edited. Even if that edit is to pick the moment when the story begins to be told or when the story is ended, those decisions are critical in how the consumers of this information understand the story. How do you think literacy about the techniques of reality TV have changed over time? I definitely think that the level of sophistication of viewing

has changed over that period of time. I think that our viewers now even have some of the vocabulary of television making. I was just talking to somebody the other day about RuPaul's Drag Race, and they were talking about, oh, yes, that they had a villain edit now a villain edit isn't something that i we have ever used in my conversations with the story team we we never go oh yeah let's give this person a villain edit but we absolutely knew what they meant. We have had conversations with people who were involved in shows, and they go, am I mistaken? It looks like you're making me the bad person in this conversation.

And you go, well, this shouldn't be new. This isn't something that you, you know, these aren't, we're not putting words in your mouth, but we're definitely following a storyline here for sure. And when speaking about the production techniques between reality TV and the news media, I mean, think about our conversation right now. I mean, you're putting a lot of trust in me that I'm going to represent you fairly, but you know, I'm going to be editing it. You know, I'm going to be moving parts of our conversation around. In a sense, right now, you are the housewife and I am you, the story editor. Absolutely.

And that's why you have to use your self-editing beforehand. And this may be news for everybody, that Matthew and I had a pre-interview before this. This may sound like a spur of the moment conversation, but I had a general idea of where the conversation was headed. And so I had about a week to think about things. So I hopefully don't sound as put on the spot as I feel sometimes. So yeah, there is a trust, but also at the same time, because what people want to hear is they want to hear somebody speaking spontaneously or they want to know what people really think or really feel. Like in journalism, construction in reality shows can be used for good or evil. It can make a complex story more understandable. It can also unfairly distort the truth. There are

lots of stories about people who feel they were unfairly given the villain edit, leading to harassment and denigration. But producers feel this pull to fulfill a story arc. For instance, in my conversation with Dave, I was hoping he'd really wrap a bow on the first half hour of this episode. He knew he'd be at the end of the first half, by the way. At the end of the first half of this episode. Okay. I had a sense from our pre-interview that Dave wanted to say something about the relationship between people's literacy in reality TV translating over into literacy when consuming news media. I was hoping he'd say watching reality TV directly makes people better consumers of the news because they become more familiar with construction, better critical thinkers, and so on. I mean, I'd have to find research and what have you to support it, but wouldn't that be satisfying? After all that storytelling I did about news media hating on reality TV, and then floop, Dave flips it right around? A little self-serving of me to say unscripted television educated the public on how things aren't always as they seem on television. But I think, though, that unscripted television definitely gave audience members and the public a vocabulary and a thing that they could refer to to talk about more important, higher stakes, real life stories.

Ah, see, Dave's a pro. He knew how to express a feeling, an idea, a sentiment, but not be absolutely tied to some grand conviction. That hope and that desire for a complete story arc, well, that's what producers are looking for in reality television. a complete story arc, well, that's what producers are looking for in reality television. In one of the recent shows that I was working on, we were talking about, is this character going to be redeemed? First of all, is he redeemable? And if he's not, how is that satisfying story-wise? And, if we can't redeem this person or if this person cannot redeem himself, then what's going to happen? What we do. And it raises the stakes for us involved in that storytelling as well of going, we really want our character to have a journey, you know, and to learn

about himself and to change and to grow. And when that doesn't happen sometimes, then we wind up telling a story that isn't as good. And, you know, we wind up telling a story that may be more true, We wind up telling a story that may be more true, but lower stakes and less interesting. Of course, there's always that reality show trick of if you want to make it sound like someone's saying something really intense, really high stakes, you go over to your production music library and you lay a bed right under that baby. And, you know, we wind up telling a story that may be more true, but lower stakes and less interesting. You're listening to Ideas and a documentary called Reality Check from Matthew Lazen Ryder. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and on Sirius XM. In Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Gold, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime.

I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. In the first part of this episode, we heard about the ways reality TV is both real and fake. In the next part, an argument for how reality TV, and maybe even life itself, is neither. And what can happen when everything is meaningless. This is Reality Check. Good morning, Lindsay. Good morning to you, George.

For those who question just how real is reality TV. How real, by the way, is reality TV. So how real is most reality TV. A little later, we'll take a look at how real is reality TV. Just how real is reality TV. So how real is most reality TV? A little later, how real is reality TV? Just how real is reality TV? Plus, see how reality TV's realness is coming under fire. Some questions about the reality of reality TV going back to 2010. Sometimes, when you look back on old news coverage, it feels a little quaint. The things we used to care about.

That of all the things that might not be real, reality TV is the thing that got so much attention. And now in a world of AI and bots and chat GPT and deep fakes, we have so much more realness and fakeness to sort through. You know, one of my starting points was the constant accusation that people make toward reality television, which is that, oh, it's all staged. It's all just fake. Well, what isn't staged at this point? I mean, everything is staged. Tom Syverson, writer and author of Reality Squared, a postmodernist analysis of reality TV and the world today. Even my sense of self is staged. I bring up the example about so-called imposter syndrome. On the one hand, the simple version of it is like, okay, I have this kind of self-confidence issue where I see myself differently than the outside world sees it. And I really haven't earned my accomplishments. And I'm just kind of like faking being a doctor.

And I don't really like have the skills that people think I do. But one poll I saw or one study I saw was that it's like 70% of people say they relate to these feelings and feel them on a regular basis. So this is not like a syndrome anymore. It is a fact of life that there is this kind of disconnect between the way we feel on the inside and just what our daily lives are. One of the things that certainly accelerated during the pandemic is a political question of even if we're all inhabiting the same reality. Reality TV didn't just spring up out of nowhere. And reality TV isn't the thing that destabilized our sense of shared reality. These are trends that have been occurring in the United

States and elsewhere for decades. It would make sense that our popular culture would follow on those trends, that the most effective and immediate and exciting forms of narrative would probably fit what our material experiences are like, what shared reality is really like, what it means to form an identity today, that there would be a form of narrative that reflects those things and that has things in common with our real experiences. Philosophers have concerned themselves with the nature of reality for millennia. Far fewer have considered the nature of reality TV. But one philosopher in particular argued that reality in the modern world of television,

digital, and mass media barely exists at all. And the idea of real people on television is proof. His work has gone in and out of style, sparked beefs with his contemporaries, and inspired some grandiose pop culture interpretations. But in a time when it seems like less and less is real, his work might give us insight into the world today. Let's start with a bit of early reality television. Produced in New York by WNET. Today is December 31st, 1971, the last day that our camera crews filmed the William C. Loud family. This is from a show called An American Family. It aired in 1973 on PBS.

A look into the life of a real family called the Louds. It was an experiment in television. Reality on TV. In the house at 35 Wooddale Lane, the children are preparing for tonight's New Year's Eve party. They were filmed for weeks in their home, and it was all edited down to 12 one-hour episodes. It was more sedate than today's reality TV, but it did break certain ground. There was the format,

and the fact that the family included an openly gay son, Lance Loud, and a divorce caught on camera. No, I know. You know there's a problem. Mom and Dad, Pat and Bill Loud, were separated by the time the filming was done. I think it's a short-sighted end to the part, really. The show inspired many copycats and follow-ups and imitators,

including the MTV reality series The Real World. It also found its way into philosophy. Interesting is the illusion of filming the louds as if TV weren't there. An absurd paradoxical formula. Neither true nor false. The philosopher was Jean Baudrillard, born in 1929, died in 2007. He came from the world of French critical theory, with its roots in Marxism. He was associated with postmodernism, and over time he adopted some ideas from Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan and ended up carving his very own unique path and view on the world.

He was particularly interested in the concept of the real, including the experiment in reality TV. A single nebula whose simple elements are indecipherable, whose truth is indecipherable. Those words come from Baudrillard's 1981 book Simulation and Simulacra. He wrote many books, but that one is probably his most influential among non-academics. In the book, he argued that an American family represents exactly what the world has become, a representation of a representation of reality. Everything is copies and the originals are lost. Metaphorically, it's like we've replaced the whole world with a map of the world and pretend the map is the real thing. There are only hints of the ground that used to be.

It is the real and not the map whose vestiges remain in the deserts that are no longer those of the world, but of ours, the desert of the real. All right, if all of this sounds kind of like that movie, The Matrix, well, the makers of that movie thought so too. This isn't real. What is real? How do you define real? Welcome to the desert of the real. Ah, there's a little Baudrillard right there in The Matrix from 1999.

The character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, even keeps his computer files in a hollowed out copy of Simulation and Simulacra. Unfortunately for the makers of the movie, Baudrillard didn't like it and he felt it misinterpreted his ideas, saying, The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that only the Matrix could have produced. To try and better understand what he was on about, let's use one of Baudrillard's own examples from the book. Instead of a big, evil computer simulation, Baudrillard would rather you think about Disneyland. Disneyland is the perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms, the pirates, the frontier, the future world.

But what attracts the crowd the most is, without a doubt, the social microcosm, the religious, miniaturized pleasure of real America, of its constraints and joys. So, you want to go to Disneyland, what do you do? You get in your car, and you drive down a freeway, and you park in the parking lot,

you go up to the little ticket kiosk, you make a transaction, and you get into the park. And then you're in Main Street, USA, a wonderful little simulation of Americana. And then you leave, and you get back in your car, and you you drive back home and you think about your pleasant day in the simulated reality. But, says Baudrillard, you've tricked yourself. Disneyland wasn't a little fantasy adventure for the day. You never left the fantasy to begin with. We only pretend that Disneyland is fake to avoid the fact that everywhere is fake. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles, and the America that surrounds it, are no longer real but to the order of simulation. The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false,

set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real. It's easy to get carried away with this stuff. Baudrillard is not talking about a sinister conspiracy, but he is trying to describe the modern human condition and how our sense of what's real is so entangled with the media we consume and how we yearn for something real, but we just can't find it. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness, natural food, health food, yoga.

food, yoga. Say you get home from Disneyland and you want to do something more real with the rest of your day. Well, how about you get some real, natural, healthy food? We believe in food that's naturally beautiful and fresh, delicious and powerful, and full of nutrients. Food that makes us nourished and mighty, and connects us to the natural world. We believe in real food. Real food, a campaign slogan from a large food retailer. So, instead of going to Disneyland to get some real food, you, well, you get in your car and you drive down the freeway and you park in a parking lot and you walk inside and you make a transaction and you drive home again. Baudrillard would argue that your experience at both places was made meaningful by media.

We collect in our brains the meaning of things from media, from companies, from television and advertising, and our experience at Disneyland is made meaningful by TV shows featuring quaint Americana. And our experience buying real food, whatever that is, is made meaningful by images of smiling families eating lettuce. You did the exact same thing as going to Disneyland, you just took a different exit. They're both of the same order, but we've convinced ourselves that one is more real than the other. And, according to Baudrillard, the levels of simulation don't stop there. It doesn't just affect the things that we buy, but the way we interact with each other, the territory of reality TV.

Take, for example, the idea of romance. I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to cover my eyes, because I kind of want to just black every single thing out, and just be with you in this moment. Okay. Can you do that too? Yep, I will close my eyes. Okay.

Well, even the term romance itself has a kind of a history right that doesn't appear out of anywhere and of course what you do when you're in romance is one of the things that reality tv might provide a context for i wanted to give you something that meant something to me then i I started putting things in this box. So how do you know that you're in romance, even though that doesn't make any grammatical sense? Well, you do these things, right? Brett Nichols works in the Department of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is also an editor of the international academic journal Baudrillard Now,

and he is interested in ways media shape our social interactions. I think I come from the position that what's important about social life are the kind of meanings that we ascribe to different things that we actually do. And so that's always a mediated kind of process. So those meanings that we have come out of culture, come out of our context, place we're born, the place we grew up, the sort of social institutions that we were involved in our being raised as we grew up and so on. And, you know, I know a lot of people attack the postmodern and so on these days, but, you know, my position would be

there's no unmediated raw reality anywhere uh from the moment you walked into my pod i just knew there was something so special about you uh at the time i couldn't really put my finger on it you are the only one that makes me feel this burning fire in my heart. And I promise each and every day that I will love you, even when times are tough. You know, we could look historically at something like romance and marriage, and this actually shifts across time. It's a very culturally specific, historical kind of thing.

It doesn't change that people are attracted to each other, right? That doesn't change. What changes, what shifts historically is the way that that attraction is made meaningful. What I think I'm suggesting is I don't think romance is a particularly natural kind of category. I think it's actually produced and reproduced through a kind of a system. So I think reality TV is one of the places where, I mean, in media studies, we would use a term like ideology, right? What, you know, an ideological construction of romance, what it is to be in romance, to recognise that this is romance, what you do when you're in love. Hi ladies.

Hi. The meaning of this rose is that I felt like we took a step forward in our relationship and I think that's what's most important. You buy particular kinds of gifts, you do particular things, particular modes of speech, right? At this point, I have to go with my gut, and I feel like I know who the three women are that I want to move into next week. In shows like Love is Blind and The Bachelor, romance has some very specific stages. The ideological construction of romance in reality TV might be something like, romance is a process of elimination in a search for the one. And finding

the one is what makes your life meaningful. It's how you become whole and become a proper functioning part of society. Hey everyone. Hi. Everyone looks so beautiful tonight. Thank you. Thank you. I always say I'm hopeful because I know love is here. With that, let's begin.

I think all the ideology happens at that level of the way that particular practices, feelings, all of those kinds of things become made meaningful, tie a person to a system. Ladies, I'm Bachelor, but his argument about television wasn't just that we imitate it. It imitates us. We collect a little ideology in our brains, and then we're also the people that end up on TV. We're stuck in a hall of mirrors where there's no real sociality, just this manufactured thing that bounces back and forth. Such a blending, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium, without the possibility of isolating the effects,

spectralized. Dissolution of TV and life. Dissolution of TV and life. Dissolution of life in TV. To Baudrillard, our relationship with media is so ever-present that we derive the meaning of all things from media.

Things that were once organic and ambiguous and ever-shifting are now codified in our relationship with media. What he basically means is that we now live in a world which doesn't have any ambiguity in it. When we come to a stop sign and we're going along in a car, that sign means one thing. It just means stop. That's it. There's no ambiguity with that sign. That sign works in terms of codes, right? Now, not all signs historically have worked like that.

There are ambiguous signs. Romance. It's this very ambiguous kind of term, right? That's good because it means when people get together, they have to work out together what that is through a process of to-ing and fro-ing and then what comes out the other side in their sort of relationship might necessarily be where they thought that they were going to begin with, right?

Ambiguity, exchange. Baudrillard's argument is that the world has stopped working like that and now begins to work in terms of the code. So everything is either good or bad, right, good or evil, yes, no, right, wrong. And that's what Baudrillard's talking about when he's talking about the contemporary kind of world being controlled by the code. So it defines everything for us in terms of this yes, no, right, wrong.

Being able to manufacture some aspect of that kind of world of illusion or that world of to-ing and fro-ing. And that's what his beef is in some ways. The degree to which reality television, what he would think, manufacture scandals, manufacture conflict. And they're so good at doing that, manufacture these kinds of authenticities. And it's so good at doing that, manufacture these kinds of authenticities. And it's so good at doing that, that we can't tell whether or not, you know, this is the kind of actual messy world that we live in, right?

It sort of replaces that actual messy world. In the book Simulation and Simulacra, Baudrillard argues that over time, representations have less and less to do with reality until they become detached from it. A simulation is a representation of reality. A simulacra is a representation of a representation of reality. And with television, what happens is we derive meaning from it, and television shows that meaning back to us, like, look, you're living a meaningful life. If the competitions in dating shows are romantic, what possible connection does romance have to reality? Baudrillard's big concern was, if everything that once had meaning, like social life, family, opinions, values, convictions, is just replicated in media, and then replicated in

life, and then replicated in media again, nothing actually has any meaning at all. Everything is a copy of a copy, and the originals are lost. And then we're lost in the desert of the real. With everything. So Baudrillard would argue, politics used to mean something, used to be about values and convictions, but not anymore. Now it's about spectacle and strategy and scandal. He'd say that debates in the news used to be about the messy world of values and convictions, but now they're about polls and statistics and data. Even history, when we think we know it, we only believe in recreations, reenactments, fictionalizations. The great event of this period, the great trauma,

is this decline, these death pangs of the real. Later in Simulation and Simulacra, Baudrillard does offer an idea of where things go when nothing has any meaning. People will try to resurrect meaning in the worst possible ways. All content can be evoked. All history is resurrected. War, fascism, revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and mixed indiscriminately. It is into this void that the phantasms of history reappear,

not because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect that period when at least there was history, at least there was violence, when at least life and death were at stake. Of course, Baudrillard could be totally wrong about everything. I mean, I'm part of the media. If I put Baudrillard on the radio, I've absorbed him into the Matrix and made him wrong by default. Maybe people like you and me are perfectly capable of making meaning ourselves. True meaning.

Out of life. Out of romance. Out of politics and out of media. Including reality TV. I started this episode talking about the Great British Baking Show. I think that's a pretty meaningful show. It's about perseverance, and helping people out even if it puts you a little bit behind, and coming to terms with the failures and disappointments that inevitably accompany life. You know, sometimes your cake didn't rise.

And that's okay. And that's meaningful. Tom Syverson, author of Reality Squared, thinks perhaps our way out of this avalanche of fakeness is treating things a little more like reality TV. Appreciating the fakeness, the construction, because that's what allows the reality to shine through. Knowing that, look, it's impossible to grasp the truth of the entire world. It's impossible to know exactly what's going on everywhere or to find the final truth of these things. And we need to be comfortable with that. And we need to raise an eyebrow a little bit whenever anything is holding itself out as the clear, straightforward, concrete truth. You need to take a side

knowing that you're not ever going to be 100% perfectly informed. And you just need to eventually choose what feels right. And you need to hold both things in your mind at once, that we want to hold on to some sense of a shared objective reality, yet also knowing we can't be entirely naive in thinking that we're going to get that every time. We just need to do the best we can. You are listening to Reality Check by Ideas producer Matthew Lazenrider. Check by Ideas producer Matthew Lazenrider. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Special thanks to Tim Weeks, Nahid Mustafa, Sean Foley, and Lisa Godfrey for their voices. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.