Social Media Over Friends

They call it “reality TV”, and you hear things like “real life”, “real drama”, “real talk” and so on. But what does “reality TV” actually mean? The last couple of weeks we have been studying media framing, class, reality TV shows and what people may not realize about the “real” in reality. TV shows like Real Housewives, Honey Boo Boo, and Duck Dynasty are three shows that we focused on in class. The media industry is a corrupt, manipulating and addicting aspect of our lives, and it often results in a false consciousness, or false views of the world and the way things “really” are. The lifestyles of the rich and the famous are almost unattainable by most and viewers everywhere are receiving false information about the celebrity world and how they get to where they are. The Real Housewives convinces viewers that they are hard working, dedicated, and real, but in reality, they are lazy and get money and praise for spending money in “disgusting ways”. The average housewife lives nothing like the ones on the TV shows and that is as obvious as it gets, yet, for some reason, we still tune into watch these outrageous, boring lives of reality TV stars to what? End up creating unrealistic expectations of what our lives will never be and therefor lowering the satisfaction for what we do have?

From one extreme to the next, we can go from watching absurdly rich women, to carnival like hillbillies in the shows Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo. These shows are insulting these families by adding dramatic music, providing close captions when they speak, emphasizing their accents, and showing their gross behavior on TV. They stereotype these families and humiliate them in a way that the can be describes as “in good fun”, but what people don’t realize with these shows is that, in reality they are not only dirt poor, filthy, hillbillies as they are depicted on TV, but are actually pretty well set in terms of money and literacy. The Duck Dynasty members are very wealthy and can afford to take trips to Hawaii, but media is sure to show them as out of place in such scenarios. The wives in Duck Dynasty are all beautiful, well-dressed, thin, sophisticated women and that shows that they are living a more glamorous lifestyle than we may think.

The point is that reality television is deceiving and can lead the viewers to have false assumptions of the lives of housewives, or hillbillies. People need to be more aware and notice how media framing is doing to our perception of others.