Minor Post #2 by Lewis Brown

 I might pick up this thread in more detail for a proper post tomorrow, but I wanted to put this out there sooner in case people were looking for a show to skim ahead of Friday's class. Oulette and Hay's article instantly made me think of one of the more unfathomable TV shows I've ever had the pleasure of watching: CBS's too-short-lived 2007 Kid Nation. 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. Far from the Lord of the Flies comparison the circumstances might invite, however, 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. The colonial context is self-evident and played up with some irony, if not self-awareness: the kids are referred to as "pioneers," the set design and cinematography deliberately ape a Western tone (the town is called Bonanza), there's even a fake old book detailing Bonanza's past as a failed frontier society, written as an injunction for this newer effort at nation-building to pick up where the frontier project left off and, indeed, to build back better. But far from starting from scratch, the kids inherit a rather sophisticated political economy, wherein four are predesignated as the town council, the meaningful decision-making body, who select other kids to join their "districts." Most jaw-dropping is a painted wooden chart laying out the town's economic caste system: upper class, merchants, cooks, and laborers, who are paid $1.00, 50, 20, and 10 cents respectively for a day's work. These districts are assigned to these roles following a classic reality-TV style competition which hinges on extracting water (though it certainly makes one think of oil, what with the frontier settlement of it all) from wells in the ground. The ultimate power with which the council is imbued is the allocation of a gold star, worth its literal weight in gold—$20,000—and given to one lucky kid at each town hall in recognition of hard work or just vibes. This crowning achievement, of course, becomes the driving force behind the kids' commitment to their nation-building project, reifying a logic of individualism within the ostensibly communitarian effort. All of this political infrastructure is of course unquestioned within the logic of the show, but speaks nicely (as Oulette and Hay invite) to the questions unasked in thinking through a "democratization" of TV/media. It's worth a watch, which you can do here.

Also, apropos of Oulette and Hay's passing reference, here's my favorite clip from The Apprentice.