Abstract
This paper explores the changing nature of audience participation and active viewership in the context of Reality TV. Thanks to the ongoing rise of social media, fans of popular entertainment programmes continue to be engaged in new and innovative ways across a number of platforms as part of an ever-expanding interactive economy. Love Island 2018 has pushed the boundaries of this participatory culture by exploiting new forms of digital media in order to encourage multi-platform consumption of content by the show's fans. This paper argues that while this strategy has enabled Love Island to successfully exploit monetization opportunities, it has simultaneously created opportunities for the show's audience to group together online and form communities of resistance which have placed themselves in opposition to the show's producers. These fan communities have harnessed the connective powers of social media to pool together their means and knowledge and to eventually exercise modes of sousveillance designed to hold “powerful” actors to account for perceived wrongdoing on the show. Examples of such behavior during Love Island 2018 hint at a paradigm shift in the relationship between television producers and audiences and demonstrate the new pathways available to audiences as they seek to answer the perennial question of this entertainment genre: how real is Reality TV?
Highlights
In the past two decades, considerable scholarly analysis has reviewed the growth and proliferation of different forms of Reality TV (Nabi, 2007; Andrejevic, 2008)
This paper argues that the latter of these developments has recently begun to impact the former—audiences engaged within a participatory culture are increasingly querying the authenticity of Reality TV
As television producers continue to push for consumption of their products across multiple platforms, audiences are finding new ways to consume and engage with popular entertainment such as Reality TV
Summary
In the past two decades, considerable scholarly analysis has reviewed the growth and proliferation of different forms of Reality TV (Nabi, 2007; Andrejevic, 2008). Academic discussions of Reality TV have focused on the ways in which this televisual format has sought to generate audience participation. This, it is argued, has led to the transformation of viewers from passive consumers to active participants as part of an ever-expanding interactive economy (Andrejevic, 2004; Holmes, 2004). The paper considers how a contemporary form of Reality TV, Love Island, has pushed the boundaries of audience participation by exploiting the connective potential of social media, and in doing so, how Love Island’s producers have reaped commercial rewards. The final section of the paper brings these strands together and draws upon examples from Love Island 2018 to demonstrate how audiences have re-imagined their engagement and participation and repurposed this to exercise modes of sousveillance to hold the show’s producers to account
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