Brad’s random, skeletal musings on Idol and the culture industry.

The topic: Culture is not neutral: whom does it serve?

Case study: American Idol.

Who are the players?: Audience, participants, producers, advertisers, subcultures (gender, race, class, religion, genre)

Who is benefiting from the process of pop star creation?

Who is being duped?

Clearly the contestants are being duped. Take young Sanjaya for example: the world was his oyster until he decided he wanted to express his individuality with a faux-hawk and now he’s sweating it on the Bat Mitzvah circuit.

THE TELEVISION AUDIENCE

Since American Idol is primarily a televisual event, let’s talk about how the audience might be being served by the Idol machine. John Ellis‘ article, Witness: A New Way of Perceiving the World, talks about the shift in how we experience events brought about by the televisual screen. He notes several effects of televisual experience (what he calls witness):

• Feeling of separation and powerlessness, provoking guilt or disinterest.
• Panoptic view, a multitude of perspectives.
• Feeling of complicity in the events.
• Superabundance of information, offhand details, as opposed to the written word, undermining the control of the television producer.

In regard to American Idol, the spectator is put in a position of (illusory?) power as American Idol opens up the machinic processes of pop star creation to the viewer and gives them the chance to participate in the process by voting. The process of voting via SMS certainly indicates a different paradigm to the witness paradigm of Ellis.

The audience of American Idol is constructed as being in the place of music industry bigwigs.

But of course, this is all part of raising revenue for the telephone companies.

Exposure to the inner-workings of the culture industry: This is a common theme in a lot of instances: DVD extras, web blogs such as CHUD.com and Defamer, TV shows such as 30 Rock and Entourage. – Is this democracy or just the industry adapting to leach more money from us?

“Experience is the new reality” – check out this video which explains the hot new buzzword in marketing: prosumer