Michael Wood on the impact of reality TV
The changes in television during my time making films have been truly astonishing. July marked 20 years since the first episode of Big Brother aired on British TV, and Radio 4 recently broadcast a fascinating show called Watching Us (available on BBC Sounds), which explores how reality TV has given birth to new kinds of societal attitudes pervasive enough to mark a change in our culture that historians simply cannot ignore. It put me in mind of the turbulent events of 1968 and a book that left its mark on us students then, even though we didn’t see as clearly as its author the direction in which things were heading (to be fair to us, this was a universe with only two television channels, and no internet or mobile phones!). The book was The Society of the Spectacle and it was written by Guy Debord, who played a key role in the May 1968 revolt. Not lacking in self-confidence, Debord called it “the most important book of the 20th century”.
Debord put forward a striking view of modern western mass society. “All of life now presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” he wrote. “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.” Depressed by mass production and consumption, and the hegemony of governments and media over everyday life, Debord saw ‘authentic’ social life replaced by its representation, going from being to having to appearing. This was the moment in history in which, he argued, “the commodity completed its colonisation of social life”.
This is where Channel 4’s Big Brother comes in.
In the past 20 years, a perfect storm has blown up with the rise of reality television, smartphones and social media; changing culture, society and behaviour – and even democracy itself. Future historians will study it with the same interest as they do the Mass Observation project of the 1930s and 1940s. In Big Brother, 10 strangers went into a house to live under constant camera surveillance. To live – and to perform. But at what point did one become the other?
The idea took off, with proliferating cable channels producing more and more cheap content, enlisting viewers to be part of the show. Within 10 years it gave birth to new kinds of formats such as The Only Way Is Essex, in which the lives of ordinary people became the subject of the show. Its scenes may have been constructed, but the idea was that the relationships and the emotions were real. ‘Constructed reality’ even became a category at the Bafta awards.
It was at this point that social media took off. Facebook, which had been devised in 2004, suddenly exploded; today, it has a billion users. Now you, too, could be a star: on a democratic platform such as YouTube, you could have a TV channel of your own with an inbuilt audience, followers, opinions and ratings. YouTube’s influence has continued to grow: its most popular channel now has 140 million subscribers. On these digital platforms, as Debord foresaw, fame “has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing”.
Streaming your life changes how you behave. You must be emotional, create drama, turn every mundane act into a piece of self-expression to be shared with the world – editing and performing a version of yourself even if is not real. Or does the version online now constitute the reality? Debord’s assertion that the future would be a ‘pseudoenvironment’ starts to seem incredibly prescient when you consider he was writing in the pre-digital age. The line between truth and fiction has become truly blurred.
And finally, inevitably, democracy itself is impacted. ‘Fake news’ is propagated everywhere and online opinion is groomed, manipulated and harvested. The crowning product of this headlong 20-year reality rush is Donald Trump, a reality TV star who acted out the role of a great deal-maker who got things done – even though, as Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnson’s 2016 book documented, he had no such talent, only the ability to self-promote. Trump’s election as US president was the triumph of the Society of the Spectacle.
Guy Debord’s final film took its title from a medieval monk’s riddle. It is a palindrome: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (‘We enter the circle in the night, and are consumed by the fire’). Its answer? Moths.