Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television [Paperback]

Jon Dovey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2000

True confessions, fake films and docu-soaps -- in the last ten years factual television has been transformed by an explosion of new genres. Freakshow offers a serious look at 'reality TV' in an attempt to understand the mass media's fascination with intimacy, deviancy, and horror. Jon Dovey analyses reality TV in terms of the political economy of the mass media. He investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal the only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives? Are the politics of the self the only alternative to the defunct grand narratives of yesterday? In concentrating not on the reception of these new television forms but on the choices, models and agendas which inform their production, Dovey reveals the relationships between social anxieties, economic pressures and their specific inflections in media texts. In a critical analysis of media industry practice, Dovey asks why directors can't stay out of range of their own cameras -- and what is the role of the television of intimacy within broadcasting.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'This critical analysis of media industry practice investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal our only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives?' Voice of the Listener and Viewer Bulletin'Jon Dovey's book is a timely and much needed theoretical analysis of carefully contrived first person media and analyses teh cahnging nature of factual television at the end of the twentieth century ... Freakshow places teh television of intimacy within cutlural context and importantly stresses that the televising of 'real life' and confessional discourse are an expression of broader political and economic changes in our social existence.' Intensities: the Journal of Cult Media'John Dovey's Freakshow is an extremely timely discussion of the extraordinary boom in 'reality TV' in recent years.'Joe Moran - American Studies Today

About the Author

Jon Dovey is a writer, producer and senior lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the West of England. He is the editor of Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Contact (Lawrence and Wishart, 1996).

Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (September 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745314503
• ISBN-13: 978-0745314501
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,332,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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