Toward an Interaction-Centered Approach to Media Events: Mediated Public Intimacy on the Reality TV ShowBig Brother

Abstract

Scholarship on media events has rarely considered how interpersonal interactions between participants mobilize collective feelings of solidarity. Drawing on a study of Big Brother Israel, we demonstrate how several structural-interactional features of the show encourage viewers to shift from a position of bystanders to one of confidants and companions of the contestants. We analyze this shift through the lens of mediated "public intimacy"-the staging of exclusive interactions in front of a third party. The emergent sense of collective complicity affects everyday interactions between viewers and public discourse on social media. We conclude that beyond the public staging of self, it is the staging and concretization of social relations in media events that serves to reaffirm the collective's solidarity.

Public intimacy in social media: The mass audience as a third party

“…The meaning of such a performance emerges only in and through the social interaction, reminiscent of the way that interactive message exchange is characterized by relatively spontaneous and unpredictable turn-taking, in which the content of the exchange is often clarified only after the other parties respond (Rafaeli and Sudweeks, 1997). I initially developed the concept of public intimacy to account for men’s friendship practices in semi-public settings (Kaplan, 2005) and expanded it to examine sociability in social clubs and organizations (Karazi-Presler 2020; Kaplan, 2014, 2018) as well as in televised media events (Kaplan and Kupper, 2017). Although the original formulation referred to offline face-to-face interactions, this concept is all the more relevant to online social media.…”