Shadow Elite: Truthiness, Porn and the Real Problem With Reality TV

[Joanne98]

What do the makers of reality TV and the makers of pornography have in common with some of America's top power brokers? It may be less of a stretch than it sounds. All three exploit (and have helped usher in) a culture of truthiness, resulting in a polarized citizenry content to sit in their own self-assembled fact "cocoon". This culture has also created a sort of backlash quest among viewers and voters for the scarcest of commodities these days: authenticity. Good luck finding it.

Truthiness was named by Stephen Colbert only five years ago, but the trend he identified was already at least a decade in the making. It is one of the ways in which Western culture has moved away from many of the distinctions it once made. Institutional lines of authority frayed with the Cold War's end. Today, think tanks act as news outlets, news outlets act as entertainment companies and corporations daily stand in for government. In the broader culture, new technology and social networking, along with the collapse of old-school media, fostered an explosion of (cheap) opinionated and confessional content. This meant that the distinctions between politics and entertainment, work and play, truth and fiction have become increasingly amorphous.

The concept of truthiness itself bears some similarity to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's notion of "simulacra." Baudrillard argued that today's society is constructed around "simulacra," which (then) become reality. Simulation, unlike pretense, and like "truthiness," produces real intuitive feelings, emotions, or symptoms in someone, and, therefore, blurs the difference between the "real" and "imaginary." Today, it is the idea of reality that is often being performed and sought by the media, leaving the reality much more elusive. And there are examples across the culture that people are craving displays of certitude and authenticity, emphasis on the word "displays": more often than not, what's billed as true and real is merely the idea of reality or a kind of hyperreality.

The explosion of reality TV, of course, is a blatant case. One would have to be as guileless as, say, Kenneth the Page on NBC's 30 Rock to believe that reality TV is real and yet, does anyone believe that Jersey Shore would reach such a cultural saturation point if it was a fictional program? Its appeal seems to lie in the fact that it's neither real nor fake, but actually exists in a limbo land between the two. "Snooki" is the bastard child of the contrived and the authentic. It's notable too that the desperate TV housewives with the most buzz these days aren't the fictionals ones on ABC, but the supposed "real" housewives on Bravo, who seem more fake than the fake ones.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/emshadow-eliteem-truthine_b_785258.html