Reflexivity,Conformity,and Israeli Big Brother

Reception, Reflexivity, and Reality TV

Researchers have described various historical phases of reception studies (Alasuutari 2002; Gorton 2009; Wood 2009). Among these, feminist approaches to reception (Seiter 1999) provided the key theoretical grounding for empirical ethnographies that show, among other things, how social dimensions of gender and class structured viewers’ reflexive interpretations of television texts. Reflexivity in reception has since been a prime focus in a number of studies about reality television.

Sender (2012, 4) showed how reality makeover programs “mobilize audiences’ reflexive engagements with the texts, their viewing habits, their social relations, and their ideas about themselves as projects to be worked on.” Viewers of reality programs in her study used reality programs as a resource for conducting phenomenological negotiations about their own selfhood, for examining interiority, and for identifying authentic spaces within themselves to manage their impressions of everyday life.

Allen and Mendick (2012) reported that reality programs stimulate viewers from different socioeconomic classes to be preoccupied with issues of characters’ authenticity, albeit in different ways. Middle-class viewers defined working-class characters as inauthentic because they lacked self-control and tended toward exaggeration. Working-class viewers described members of higher socioeconomic classes in terms of their excessive snobbery and egoism in the programs. These comments showed that viewers of all classes engaged in self-reflexive activities. As the authors contend, “Our participants repeatedly linked their enjoyment of RTV shows to their ability to construe them as ‘real,’ ‘accurate,’ and ‘not fake’”(Allen and Mendick 2012, 6).

This class variation between female viewers of reality television is most detailed by Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood. They surveyed the manner in which reality shows encouraged an “economy of personhood—in which intimate bodies, parts and practices are open to evaluation and exploitation, generating what counts as worthwhile with value” (Skeggs and Wood 2012, 12). Women from the middle class, for instance, connected less to the reality participants and challenged the comments of the experts, thus affirming their own cultural knowledge. Working-class women made more moral judgments and placed more emphasis on motherhood as a means of achieving value. Like in their study, my research indicates that viewers from different social classes deal with dramatic reflexive actions when they watch a reality show.

In addition, though, my findings illustrate how viewers related dramatic reflexive actions to the unique formal characteristics of Big Brother. My interviewees avidly watched other reality programs, but did not feel the same kind of reflexivity when watching other reality programs, such as A Star Is Born, The Voice, Super Nanny, or Survival. As in other studies, my interviewees expressed this heightened sense of reflexivity through speaking with the television (Wood 2009), through self-examination, and through thoughts about the self (Sender 2012). However, they expressed Big Brother reflexivity in conjunction with an experience of inundation, which occurs as a result of the hours viewing everyday events on the show, and a new desire to be discovered. This study adds to the literature by showing the explicit and simultaneous links between a reflexive preoccupation with the self and authenticity and Sisyphean attempts to become an ideal and socially conformist self.

Methodology and Analysis

To study the interpretations of Big Brother among regular viewers, I conducted sixty in-depth interviews with viewers selected from social classes as defined by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. This office ranks all areas in the country according to socioeconomic variables, and then organizes them into ten separate geographically based class clusters. The lowest three clusters in socioeconomic terms are mainly comprised of Arab and ultra-Orthodox towns, whose residents do not watch Israeli television shows. Accordingly, I sampled interviewees with the lowest socioeconomic status from twelve Jewish towns in the fourth cluster, which I call Tavor, and interviewees with the highest socioeconomic status from four communities in the tenth cluster, which I call Narkis. These geographic names were changed to protect the interviewees’ anonymity. The interviewees were randomly sampled from the telephone book. Every person who agreed to participate in the study was included in the sample.

All sixty people—thirty from Tavor and thirty from Narkis—were regular viewers of all three seasons of Big Brother (2008–2010). Each group included an equal number of men and women, ages 31 to 62. Participants from Narkis were educated, held professional jobs (lawyers, accountants, physiotherapists, engineers, etc.), and earned considerably more than the average wage. The sampling procedure produced an all-Ashkenazi group (Jews of European extraction). The Tavor participants worked in semi-skilled and unskilled jobs (taxi drivers, receptionists, factory laborers, etc.). None of them had a formal education, and most of them earned significantly less than the national average wage. The sampling procedure produced an all-Mizrahi group (Jews from Arab countries).

Within each group, I conducted ten interviews about each Big Brother season. All interviews were conducted at interviewees’ homes. During the interviews, I talked with subjects about their favorite and least favorite contestants; their interpretations of how the contestants portrayed themselves, interacted, and managed impressions; their reasons for voting for specific contestants; and their own explanations of various program episodes and stories that had garnered their attention. I asked them to describe the most significant event that took place both on the primetime broadcast of Israeli Big Brother, which showed twice a week, and on the twenty-four-hour cable channel that followed the contestants. This comparison was necessary because many viewers ascribed their reception to this continual ability to watch the contestants on the cable channel (Channel 20 in Israel), which offered different content than the primetime broadcast. Interviews also included questions regarding the viewing of other reality programs, and the distinctive experience of viewing Big Brother as compared with other reality programs.

All of the interviews were coded and analyzed in accordance with the principles of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1998). Repeated readings of the interviews enabled me to identify three major themes: everyday interactions between the “show” and the viewer through a process of self-reflexivity and televisual othering, the experience of inundation, and the desire to be discovered.

Everyday Interactions and Reflexivity

The concept of self-reflexivity refers to an individual’s cognitive ability to observe himself or herself as an object. This ability, as many scholars stress, is social (Archer 2003; Mead 1934). It comes from social activity and the individual’s interactions with significant others, such as parents, and the generalized other. The generalized other refers to the internalization of one’s social environment, or the cultural norms and values that serve as criteria in one’s self-evaluation. According to this definition, an individual’s interactions with others do not have to be face-to-face, but can also be imagined. We conduct internal conversations on a daily basis that take other perspectives into account, thereby subjecting ourselves to self-criticism and social surveillance (Archer 2003). My findings show that viewers of Big Brother conduct internal conversations about, or interactions with, events in the show, producing the program as an “other” through which they spoke about themselves.

These conversations constituted a main reason viewers from Tavor and Narkis watched the show and have a particular penchant for it. Aya, a twenty-nine-year-old flight attendant, put it quite clearly:

Something very odd happens to me with that program. It’s the only program that makes me think about myself, who I am, exactly, how people see me, what influences my personality, my actions. I’ve developed a weird intimacy with that program. It’s become really significant for me. It’s absurd, but it’s made me understand myself better. I talk with myself a great deal [laughs] while watching the show. It’s become a kind of good friend that stimulates me.

As Aya described, the show “gets her going.” Tomer, a thirty-four-year-old architect, talked about the specific impact the show had on him:

I’m addicted to the program . . . Mostly at nighttime . . . This one’s gossiping with that one, this one’s gossiping with everyone, and then you see people’s true nature . . . And you say to yourself, you mustn’t be like that, you mustn’t act like that, violence and lies don’t look good on camera . . . There was that [character] Shai in the first season, disgusting, how violent he was, he didn’t get it, he didn’t look at himself a bit from the outside . . . That’s exactly what the program has given me, I’ve always liked observing myself from the outside.

Note that not only did Tomer stress his self-observation, but he also mentioned specific practices, such as changing a specific personality trait.

Reflexive practices aimed at reinforcing a sense of self or bringing about a change in a concept of self. Moran, a twenty-eight-year-old (female) accountant, described similar practices:

Big Brother makes me think about myself a lot, it’s like it holds up a mirror . . . it makes me look at myself, how do I look? Thin or fat, what clothes am I wearing. You can see who’s really charismatic and who isn’t . . . It forces me to think about how people see me from the outside. What impression do I make . . . And then you say, and what about me? Would the audience love me and send SMS’s for me? . . . How do I come across from the outside? How? How? How? And what do I need to improve? . . . I love watching Big Brother because I think to myself a lot, “Do I have star quality? What do I need to do so that people love me too?”

The interviewees interacted with the show as a kind of televisual other for self-reflection, much as Wood (2009) witnessed in the daily rituals of talk show viewing. This process was conveyed through a number of metaphors, three of which were used by nearly all of the interviewees, namely, psychologist, camera, and mirror. Tamir, a forty-two-year-old marketing manager, combined these metaphors as follows:

The program is like a psychologist for me, a kind of mirror that’s held up in front of you and helps you explore your psyche . . . like a camera, it makes you think about yourself, and mostly to examine yourself, and most importantly to improve yourself.

These metaphors described fundamentally similar processes for the study participants.According to social psychologists, mirrors, cameras, and therapy encourage self-awareness, reflexivity, and self-examinations. Studies have shown that the presence of a mirror in experimental conditions increases concern with one’s self, and promotes socially conformist behaviors (Heine et al. 2008). It is important to note that the metaphors of mirror, psychologist, and camera also encourage the individual to confess his or her “true” motivations, his or her secrets, and his or her “authentic” self. As in Annette Hill’s (2002) research, I found that confessional moments, aptly shot in the Confession Room, were portrayed in Big Brother as authentic moments that viewers particularly enjoyed.

Yet their comments also resonated with Foucault’s (1983) description of the confession as a pastoral way of encouraging conformity and social surveillance. Neta, a thirty-eight-year-old educational counselor, remarked,

What I like most is their confessions in the Big Brother Room. It’s an opportunity to really understand who is authentic and who is playing to the camera. Those are the best bits of the show, which let me forgive some of the housemates for a lot of what they’ve done . . . It also makes me confess things to myself, cleanse myself on the inside, a bit like with a psychologist, it’s a real show, it’s actual, about life, that’s what’s so great about it.

Conformity was expressed through a constant awareness of cultural scripts that shaped the proper self, what a number of interviewees called “a personality that comes across well,” or, in other words, the personality that wins the crowd’s approval and the largest number of SMSs. As Orly, a thirty-six-year-old receptionist related,

I think a lot about whether I’ve got the kind of personality that comes across well. Would they send SMSs for me or throw me out after the first week? Between you and me, they’d throw me out after the first week, I’m insufferable. I’ve got a big mouth. I say exactly what I’m thinking. I can’t stand hypocrites. I’m domineering. Basically, I’d argue with everyone, and the show makes me want to calm myself down a bit and moderate myself so that they’d like me and vote for me [laughs]. I say to myself, “be gracious, be gracious” so that they’ll like you.

The Experience of Inundation

Israeli interviewees sought moments of authenticity and credit the particular pleasure they gain from Big Brother to this search (see also Hill 2002). At the same time, many Israeli viewers attributed the search for authenticity to an additional viewing experience: the experience of inundation. Galit, thirty-six, suggested that this inundation was related to the show’s realness, actuality, and authenticity:

The number of hours I spend watching the show makes me feel overwhelmed, like I’m flooded with information, and this inundation makes you an expert in realness, who’s authentic and who’s faking it. The program brings out the truth in you. What can you do? That’s the meaning of reality, it’s really real, and that’s why I love this program more than any other reality show.

In an attempt to better understand the inundation experience, I asked my interviewees to portray their viewing experience of news programs that also were about the real or reality.

In response to my question, “Do you also feel inundation when you watch the news,” Matan, a thirty-two-year-old barman, replies,

I watch the news every evening and sometimes also in the afternoon. It is not the same thing. You aren’t flooded with information or events [like in Big Brother]. It’s a different experience, sometimes you watch difficult events on the news but you talk about it and release the pressure, but in Big Brother you are flooded, it’s between you and yourself, and sometimes, I am speechless about what happens there, I am dumbfounded. I am speechless.

The expression “I am speechless” with reference to the inundation experience of viewing Big Brother did not apply to the news. It fascinated me in particular as it was also articulated by other interviewees. Neta explained the feeling in context:

It is not just that I feel full of events. I am flooded, simply flooded, and I am speechless. I am often so speechless that I can’t talk about it. It is a lot of hours. It is a lot of events. It is a lot of thoughts in my head, even a lot of physical sensations, sometimes disgust or deep sadness about what is happening there . . . why am I speechless? Unequivocally because of the inundation of information, I am flooded, and that is what makes Big Brother a special program for me.

It should be noted that the previous two interviewees linked the inundation experience with four characteristics described as unique to Big Brother. First, inundation was explained in terms of viewing different events over many hours which provided emotional, cognitive, and physical (i.e., “disgust in my whole body”) stimulation. Second, the inundation experience took place between the viewer and his or her self, through internal conversations or personal reflections. Third, the inundation experience left the viewer without the ability or desire to talk about it verbally with significant others (i.e., “speechless”). Fourth, the inundation experience was described as something that subdued the viewer and left him or her with “the desire for it to remain between me and myself,” a phrase spoken by Or, a thirty-one-year-old service representative.

Inundation was not only defined as reflecting the real/reality, but was also related to the insistence that reality TV is not a game. In an attempt to comprehend why Big Brother is “real,” “serious,” and “genuine,” Doron, a thirty-year-old teacher, explained with an answer common to most of the interviewees:

It is the reality of life itself. It is not child’s play. Reality is serious. There is no room for playing around here, no room for imagining something else. What you see is what you get. We are watching real people dealing with matters from our regular lives, 24 hours a day for several months; this is not a play. It is the real thing. It is life. This is reality.

When asked to clarify whether it is possible to offer alternative interpretations of the events of the program, or the likelihood that there is an element of performance in the program, Doron responded decisively: “It is not a performance; it is serious. Reality [TV] is not a play; it’s reality.” Viewers of Big Brother saw it as “genuine reality” as opposed to a space of performance or play.

These interpretations are critical to my understanding of this reality program, because they reject any notion that viewing is playful. In anthropology, play is a sphere of life (imagined or real) that can invert meanings and help us to imagine alternatives. Don Handelman (2001, 11503) defined play as

a penchant for questioning the phenomenal stability of any form that purports to exist as a valid proposition and as a representation of “truth.” The idea of play is amoral in its capacities to subvert the boundaries of any and all phenomena and so to rock the foundations of a given reality.

Furthermore, spaces of play, the cognitive imagination of play, or the meta-communicative message, “this is play” (Bateson 1972) are said to expose the subject to ambiguity, chaos, and liminality (Kidron 2006). These paradoxes result in an oscillation between self-contradiction and self-negation and the imagining of multiple opportunities. In turn, these features have the potential to destabilize the phenomenological taken-for-granted, or to expose the subject to the existence of realities that are alternative to the hegemonic order. These seem absent in interviewees’ comments about Big Brother.

The Desire to Be Discovered

The majority of interviewees dealt reflexively with the experience of inundation by conveying their desire to be discovered, or to make the acute transition from “regular person” to “celebrity” (Alexander 2010). This keen aspiration was deftly communicated by Yifat, age 38:

I want someone to discover me. To see what I really am and show it to the world. This program makes me want someone to discover me. I know it is hard work but I am prepared to do it. Look at Ninette [the winner of the first season of A Star Is Born]. She started out as a chubby teenager, who lived in this nothing of a place called Kiryat Gat, listened to Mizrahi music, spoke like some kind of bimbo . . . and today? Today she is slim, pretty, chic, living in Tel Aviv and experiencing the world. It is astounding to me. Someone discovered her. I want to be discovered too. That’s what I really want.

I identified three characteristics of the desire to be discovered. First, the desire was usually not based on a talent, such as vocal or acting ability. Second, the desire to be discovered was closely related to the discovery or excavation of authenticity by reality production staff or experts. Many interviewees emphasized that being discovered meant external assistance in identifying one’s internal depth, authentic self, and psychological essence (see also Sender 2012). Third, the desire to be discovered was explicitly expressed as involving hard work. Many interviewees explained in detail the self-discipline, diligence, initiative, and persistence needed to be discovered, which synced with makeover narratives (Weber 2009), as well as psychological selfhood and neoliberal discourses (Skeggs 2009). Hence, the desire to be discovered and the work involved in doing it resounds with the concept of the belabored self, which McGee (2005) developed as the foundation of self-help literature.

Dana, aged 28, conveyed her belabored self in this way:

I know that it requires a lot of work, a high level of self-critique, the self-discipline of a monk, diets, workouts, psychologists, cosmeticians, but it is worth it. Someone discovers you and you connect to who you really are; it is very difficult to do it on your own . . . Why do I want to be discovered? Because it will help me to connect to myself, bring out the truth in me, show me how to be full of life, productive, creative, responsible, thinking about the future. And the whole world will see it. And I will also be thin forever [laughs].

The belabored self finds its own faults, reprimands, and criticizes itself. In the desire to be discovered, it is a self that consistently adheres to and tries to align with a cultural ideal of proper selfhood (Skeggs 2009).

Whereas inundation is the antithesis to play, the desire to be discovered actually relates to passion as well as desire. My choice of the word desire is not coincidental, for it connects to the experience of the current self as a lacking self that wants to be discovered to achieve a fuller self. This follows a pop psychology discourse that appears in reality shows, talk shows, self-help literature, and popular therapy treatments and is based on an experience of the self as empty, requiring fulfillment, and as a problem (McGee 2005). The word passion, however, is a transformative experience that has the power to distance the self from fixed identities, establish existing alternatives, and, in turn, challenge reality. These intense, disruptive qualities, as well as transgression of one’s habitual self (Zembylas 2007), are embodied in the experience of passion (and not in desire): “What is passion? . . . A state that is always mobile . . . one is simply not oneself. In a state of passion, one is not blind. To be oneself no longer makes sense” (Foucault 1986, 313). This link between reflexivity, desires, and social-control is critical to understanding these viewers’ experiences of Big Brother.

Conclusion

The participants in this study emphasized that watching Big Brother encouraged internal conversations about their private selves, such as how they would conduct themselves if they were on the show, how the audience and the other housemates would perceive them, and whether they would send an SMS to vote to keep him or her on the show until the finale. These internal conversations were one of the main reasons for religiously watching the show. Unlike other reality programs, the 24/7 nature of the program intensified an inundation of emotions that most frequently had an outlet through the desire to be discovered. Big Brother viewers I spoke with expressed personal reflexivity by making personal confessions that recognized the gap between their private selves and their cultural ideals. By understanding the specificity of reception in relation to this text, we may better expand our understanding of the relations between reality TV, reception, and reflexivity.

The findings in this article also suggest the future need for more comparative research with regard to the reception of specific reality programs, such as Big Brother, in different countries. This comparison could provide an in-depth understanding of the manner in which national scenarios for programs influence reflexivity and reception. This comparison could clarify whether and how class structures are expressed through the reflexive discourses of reception, thereby adding nuance to the ways the structural and the psychological interact through viewers’ responses to television.