No. 9 - (reflection pg 49-58) Teen Mom 2 and the Addiction to Hyper-Aware Hyperreal Media

In blurring the line between view and viewer, active and passive, and real and model, reality tv is a format with consequences unique to it (apart from/similar to maybe televised news, etc.), in that it throws us and the television into a slightly indiscernible realm of hyperreality. 

Reality television is no longer the new thing it was for Baudrillard, so its particular phenomena state is common-place for us, though not in Baudrillard's way of putting things. We understand its fictitious nature and ability to manipulate both audience and cast (mistreatment, misleading production direction, etc.), as well as its layer of labeled-reality. "They lived as if we weren't there" was the trump-card of the Loud family experiment's creator and is an obvious naivety and arrogance to the reality of its production and product. Automatically, by putting cameras in their home, their own behavior will change. In their own personal experience of being filmed, their reality of behavior is changed. Watching this on tv, edited for clarity for the tv medium, as well as for further distortion of the "reality" element, the show is no longer real--both less real than a show which advertises itself as fake, and more real than any other counterpart show simultaneously). 

In addition, your interaction with reality tv as the viewer is a unique experience. You acknowledge its possible falsities, as well as engage with it as a fly-on-the-wall format. Neither is wholly true at any given time, so I believe this is, at least sub-consciously, the prime-reason it is so engaging. Teen Mom 2, following the lives of a handful of fan-favorite teen moms from the original series in their lives not so long after giving birth to their children, has multiple conflicting statements from the moms about the reality of their lives as broadcasted, with some saying it was all real and others saying it screwed with the playout of many events. This is important but not the focus, as for all these characters, their reality was directly tangled with the reality of the show's production values (values that were not so high) and the non-reality of having their lives be edited into a reality and non-reality indiscernible from both audience and cast. Engaging in this kind of viewership becomes a hyperreal action because at any undulating point, it is real and it is fake, and not that at any point it was shot that it was fake or real, but that both exist simultaneously. Your engagement with the show is, at whatever level in your conscious, a direct engagement with hyperrealism with a layer of 'reality tv' on top (now simultaneously a symbol of documentary and fiction but this is the purpose). All reality tv since then is still an experiment, but one that does not care about the outcome since we know it will make money and the viewers know to some level of its fictitiousness--but this is the addicting point of it all. 

In this strange way/platform, we've become addicted to hyperreality. 

TM2 filmed 12 inches from the screen trying to follow the camera movements/faces