Marina:
Kid Nation exemplifies how in reality TV, Hay and Ouellette’s notion that TV offers “ways of instructing viewers about the techniques and rules of participation” becomes super meta. Lewis concisely describes the premise: “The name says it all: 40 kids (aged 8 to 15) are taken to an old west ghost town to build a nation of their own, with—ostensibly—no help from adults.” As Lewis continues in their blog post, “...Kid Nation exemplifies the version of "democracy" that television mediates and replicates, building the political and economic structures of 21st-century America into its institutional core.” However, the hierarchical and imperialist “institutional core” constituting the foundation of Bonanza City is mediated by the cuteness and hilarity of kids’ antics. At the same time, by the same absurdity, Bonanza City perhaps inadvertently exposes the senselessness of the status quo which our neoliberal society deems desirable, such as the proliferation of stores with lots of “cool stuff.” There is satisfaction to the familiarity and constructed orderliness of seeing the rules of society, encoded within the rules of the game, in a digestible manner and repetitiously delineated. The satisfaction in recognizing the rules of collective functioning and upwards mobility relate to our delight in seeing the participants of reality TV struggle and fail. While the simplicity of the “rules” instructs us, they simultaneously embolden us to believe ourselves apt potential participants, should we ever lower ourselves to their level. The exceptional success of a single or a few lucky participants affirm the possibility of the same, which we may internalize as rightfully, possibly ours.
With that introduction in mind, I do agree that reality TV “skills us to participate in our own oppression” by mediating failure within outlandish constraints as entertainment, thereby dissociating the extreme rules of the game from the even more extreme rules of survival in neoliberal society. It is important that these two things can be legibly mapped onto each other while remaining separate in the public imagination. Kid Nation is no exception as a hegemonic piece of media, and yet it inadvertently collapses the extremity of two worlds, the fictitious and the real. By inserting children in a simulation of a cartoonishly made-up colonial town, Kid Nation allows for cracks in our viewership to form and penetrate the banality of capitalist society, and the false construction of its promises. The circus of both “play” and humiliation alleviates us of our own lived successes and failures, while at the same time laying bare our latent knowledge that this is all “just a game.”
Abby:
Clip 1 - Kid Nation Bumper
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hXIUPwaG24h7FAzby1zIBDb92IsAxB77/view?usp=share_link
Clip 2 - Kid Nation - The Choice
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1agTMnIawGBTuPg2hQ1XmglugXpAw8SRQ/view?usp=share_link
It’s interesting to look at these two clips together. In the bumper clip, CBS seeks to actively empower the consumer/citizens of the show (targeting kids specifically here) to not just watch, but to also recruit others to watch. This call to action mirror’s the shows emphasis on participation and group membership, in essence inviting kids at home to join the kids in Bonanza in becoming active citizens.
In the second clip, we see the host of Kid Nation present the kids with their first challenge reward. They must choose between 7 new outhouses or a TV set. The group is divided and the council members must make the ultimate decision on behalf of the whole. The rational the kids give for their preference is interesting (not to mention amusing). One of the older kids says, “If we have the TV it would encourage people to, like, go sit on their butts and not do any work and watch TV” (I feel attacked, as this is my general relationship with TV, further evidenced by the fact that I “HAD” to watch no less than 6 episodes of this show before I was “informed” enough to write this post). Another kid speaks to the safety the TV would provide - afterall, how else will they know if a tornado is coming? The council is also divided as they discuss which option to choose, some worrying the TV would be a distraction from essential chores and their goal in building up the town. Another (rather frantic) council member argues that people are desperate for something to do, saying “I’m dying! I want to watch TV now!!” In the end, they choose the outhouses. My favorite kid, Jared, later rejoices, “We got the porta potties! YEAAAAAHHH!!!”
In contrast to the opening bumper, which attempts to appeal to the idea that TV can provide a sense of participation and empowerment, the kids of Kid Nation seem to be saying that, far from being a tool for active self-governance and citizenship, TV is a distraction from community building. If TV, as Hay and Ouellette assert, “skills us to participate in our own oppression,” it does so with a certain stealth, providing us with the illusion that we are active participants while keeping our expressions of citizenship and self-governance confined to the couch.
Fabrizzio:
Kid Nation escalates the multifold and tentative promise of shows like Survivor of showing a simulation of ‘society’ by making that the explicit focus of its show, replacing, for example, the simultaneous appeal of a survival show, character study, and competition with the comedy and melodrama of centering children. Reality TV usually offers various entry points to its concept and similarly various forms of spectatorship. Something I find interesting is that even when engaging in ironic spectatorship, usually already a layered process, there is a level you have already bought in, especially in shows such as Kid Nation, to the narrative structure of the show that is rarely pinpointed as that. We are conscious of the manufactured nature of the product and of the formulation of ‘reality’ it provides but are also attached to not reading it as a narrative construction on some level, I would say the ways we engage with reality television are usually then, on its terms even when thinking it is outside of it, this I think goes well with Marina’s comment that “the satisfaction in recognizing the rules of collective functioning and upwards mobility relate to our delight in seeing the participants of reality TV struggle and fail.” We are already enmeshed precisely because of how hyper-structured and formulaic reality television seems to be, the delineations are recognizable as microcosms in a way that seems both blatant and burrowing. Kid Nation and other shows like it play with narrative structure in more complex and literary ways than its presentation assumes is its focus, and I think something along those lines could offer an alternative reading to Hay and Oulette.
Lewis:
Clips: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1zDlMOJ7siiLcBhTCB_kc85KHyTY6hFft
Hay and Oulette write, “The question is less how has TV failed or succeeded as a mass democracy than how is a ‘mass democracy’ made rational and technically conducted in these times, when the injunction for a kind of TV that is ‘of, by, and for the people’ occurs through the pluralization and mass customization of ‘popular’ constitutions, and through experiments that are as much about failure and setbacks as about provisional successes… To consider democracy as a technical achievement that is predicated upon ongoing experiments and failures, and upon citizen education, involves moving beyond an analysis merely of TV’s representation and staging of participation and group governance and looking toward how the citizen-games and citizen-experiments occur through an array of technologies (machines, devices, skills, and logics that currently comprise and have transformed televisuality).” (208-209) Kid Nation helps us think through these technologies, if we understand that word broadly (à la Foucault): the technologies of governance that the show inherits bespeak the technologies of power underlying liberal U.S. democracy. This is emblematized, as I argued in my earlier blog post, in the show’s class hierarchy, its essential non-negotiable framework that galvanizes the drama of, in Hay and Oulette’s parlance, its “demonstrations in group participation and governance,” its “little, everyday ways of instructing viewers about the techniques and rules of participation.” (215) Kid Nation’s staging of class competition, built into the show via its invisible and immutable technologies that precede and define the terms of Bonanza City’s governance, allegorize the unasked (because unaskable) questions of the pseudodemocracy in which the show is produced: the terms of class struggle are defined by the technologies of power and can only be staged in the denuded form, antithetical to solidarity, of the competitions of daily life wherein one hopes to stand on the shoulders of a lower rung on the class ladder (whose verticality is rendered so literal in Kid Nation’s imagery) for a larger piece of the proverbial pie. In this, Kid Nation testifies rather directly to Hay and Oulette’s argument claim that “we see the freedoms afforded by Do-It-Yourself-TV as an objective of a governmental rationality that values self-enterprise, self reliance, and lessons to be learned in privatized experiments and games of self-constitutions and group government.” (224)
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