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Review: Media Fascinations: Perspectives on Young People's Meaning Making

No. 111 — May 2004 provides a frame through which television hybrids can be examined in terms of their possible role as demonstrators of ‘appropriate’ behaviour for television audiences. Viewers of these programs, in other words, are offered selectively edited entertainment packages featuring both exemplars of ‘good’ behaviour (lawful, public-minded, non-confrontational, and so on) and the public humiliation of those individuals perceived to be acting shamefully. Here the undesirable elements of society (typically including marginalised groups such as the poor) are invariably represented through, and reduced to, the grainy images of closed circuit television (CCTV) footage, while ‘normal’ members of society are allowed space to express the trauma of their victimhood at the hands of these undesirables. Palmer’s wider concerns here include the issue of whether such television tendencies suggest both an abandonment and inversion of the community-building role traditionally played by the documentary project and, in turn, whether these can also be seen to be symptomatic of a transformation in the nature of public space itself, as partly evidenced by television hybrids’ normalisation of the surveillance regimes which are integral to new community policing initiatives. This is an obviously ambitious argument to make, and Palmer is not always convincing in making his case. His chapters on video diary and makeover programs, and his concluding discussion on Big Brother, are not persuasively integrated into his wider thesis. Discipline and Liberty also draws upon a model of the relationship between television and its audiences within wider social-political contexts which is not clearly articulated. Palmer instead often writes as if the negative social-political implications of hybrids can be determined through a textual analysis of the programs themselves, couched within an outline of changes in documentary production agendas within British television institutions. Palmer spends much of the book suggesting a closing of the democratic spaces determined by television, and a narrowing of the potential for the agency of viewers, but nevertheless closes with a call for revival of the political voice of media audiences. Outside of these aspects of Palmer’s argument (and the incompleteness of his discussions are partly because there is simply not the space to detail these comprehensively), the value of Discipline and Liberty lies in its application of a distinctive perspective on documentary hybrids — one which aptly demonstrates the value of integrating discussions of governance into the wider debates over their nature and significance. — Craig Hight, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato