Paper short abstract:

By following the journey of cast members of two reality formats into the world of television production, media participation as ritual practice will be discussed, as related to questions of empowerment, agency, and the perceived symbolic value of (participating) in the broadcast media in the new media age.

Paper long abstract:

The past decades have witnessed an increasing visibility of 'ordinary' people in the media, partly through the proliferation of - often controversial - formats based on 'true' experiences and emotions of non-professional participants. This development, with all its incarnations, has resulted in important debates concerning the broader consequences of the 'demotic turn' (Turner, 2010), yet empirical research into the actual experiences of taking part in production processes is relatively scarce. This paper presents two 'behind the scenes' ethnographies, based on in-depth interviews with cast members of the Dutch coming out reality programme Uit de Kast and the highly popular British disability dating show The Undateables. By tracking the experiences of the participants of these television programmes, the paper aims to challenge the dominant, text based discourses of empowerment versus exploitation, and deliver contextualized accounts of how participation as value and as strategy is tied into notions of selfhood, agency and the sense of being connected to the social world. Discussing these cases, the paper furthermore addresses how the symbolic power of central media is being reaffirmed, challenged or refigured under the current transformations of media landscape. To this end, the presentation re-visits the Couldrian concept of media ritual: by addressing media participation as ritual practice, questioning the mechanisms through which participatory spaces are formatted, mediated practices are formalized, and myths and realities of participation are constructed and experienced in television productions, the project will explore how media rituals are being (re)made for the current era of participatory culture.