REALITY IN THE AGE OF LOST AUTHENTICITY

Text topic: Reality Programmes in Serbia – A GLOBAL OR NATIONAL PHENOMENON

Text author: Драган Ћаловић

The author starts from a hypothesis that the contemporary understanding of live broadcasting as a special argument of objectivity should not be explained by the assumption that the public is insufficiently informed about the existence of media manipulation and its possibilities, but by the general need to find strong foundations of the real, which, faced with almost hopeless search, resists any rationality. In the age of the destabilized real, reality becomes fully absorbed not only by the real but also by the constructed events. In the text, a paradigmatic manifestation of this process is recognized in the rise of reality programmes. The reality of reality programmes is actually the reality of constructing events that annihilate reality itself – which could be called a negative reality. In spite of the fact that this is an unauthentic or constructed reality, by occupying the space of the real, its rendering in the text is identified with the process of demiurgic creation, and the media industry is identified as a kind of demiurge of the new so-called media age. The depersonalization and industrial foundations of this contemporary demiurge are viewed in regard to the development of the vision of unauthentic living, and with the emergence of negative reality that erodes the very space of the real.