Abstract

Contemporary media outlets call upon an increasingly interactive engagement from audiences. Reality television in particular invites its viewers to offer feedback through a plurality of modes, notably through the internet and text messaging from portable devices. To employ Erving Goffman (1959), it is through a multi-modal appraisal of media texts that audiences are given access to a backstage where deliberate constructions of reality are sustained. This savvy engagement with media texts and media devices among audiences resonates with the expansion of practices and discourses of lateral surveillance. Through a cynical assessment of interpersonal relations as risky, discursive subjects are invited to adopt strategies---also through media devices---to monitor their peers. To this end, this research calls attention to the increasing convergence of media savvy and lateral surveillance in contemporary reality television. Here, reality television instantiates the proliferation of both strategies. In particular I am looking at Big Brother , a longstanding reality program where audiences monitor purportedly real people who are contained within an enclosure. I conduct a discourse analysis of House Calls , an online call-in talk show produced by CBS for Big Brother fans. This talk show offers a behind-the-scenes interpretation of Big Brother , and enables a critical appraisal of the program among audiences. Additionally, I will conduct an analysis of audience engagement with this discourse by looking at audience conversations about House Calls on an audience-generated online message board