Abstract
How do you feel? How do you really, really feel? If you’ve been experiencing a loss of the real lately then maybe its time you tuned in to some ‘actuality’ programming. Actuality television is the the generic term for a range of broadcast material that supposedly brings the real right into your sitting room. Recent key additions to this category are televised counselling sessions in which, as the publicity blurb puts it, ‘real people talk about real life problems’. The growth of television counselling in this, Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, suggests that it is authenticity of emotions rather than of works of art with which we are currently most concerned. To feel is to be real.
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Notes
Coward, Rosalind, ‘Have You Tried Talking About It?’, in Female Desire (London: Paladin Books, 1984).
Hattersley, Roy, ‘Indecent Exposure’, The Listener 21 July 1988.
Fiske, John, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987) p. 15.
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© 1990 The Editorial Board, Lumière (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Young, S. (1990). Family Affairs: Angst in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Day, G. (eds) Readings in Popular Culture. Insights . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20700-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20700-8_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-47523-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20700-8
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