Reality-TV fascination stems from the paradox of simulated absence, not voyeurism.
Evidence
More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren’t there. The producer’s triumph was to say: “They lived as if we were not there.” An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true nor false: Utopian. The “as if we were not there” being equal to “as if you were there.” It is this Utopia, this paradox that fascinated the twenty million viewers, much more than did the “perverse” pleasure of violating someone’s privacy. In the “verite” experience it is not a question of secrecy or perversion, but of a sort of frisson of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a frisson of simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of scale, of an excessive transparency. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 103
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘as if we were not there / as if you were there’ paradox prefigures later hyperreality analyses of reality TV; central to the reader’s stated purpose on the postmodern image. — connects to: Reality TV traded narrative craft for cheap manipulation that mirrored ordinary viewers — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 235; Absence is a mode of being between human-realities, not between persons and places — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 765; Media convergence can constitute reality rather than merely representing it. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 19
- SEED: An essay applying this ‘fascination through simulated absence’ analysis to contemporary livestreaming, mukbang, or ‘cozy gaming’ channels where performative authenticity is the commodity.
Broader Connections
- Reality TV traded narrative craft for cheap manipulation that mirrored ordinary viewers
#contradicts(0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 235 - Absence is a mode of being between human-realities, not between persons and places
#corroborates(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 765 - Media convergence can constitute reality rather than merely representing it.
#expands(0.72) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 19