Surveillance on Reality Television and Facebook: From Authenticity to Flowing Data

Aligning reality TV (RTV) with social networking sites (SNSs) enables the development of a geneology in the use of surveillance for displays of the self. By moving from “older” media such as TV to “newer” such as SNSs, we gain insight into how issues at stake for critical scholars studying surveillance practices shift when the spaces (and practices) of surveillance change. We bring into conversation work in surveillance studies, critical media studies, RTV, and new media, emphasizing the necessity of seeing connections between types of surveilled subjectivity in popular media as these contribute to a larger ethos about surveillance, subjectivity, data, and our engagement with the world. We suggest that Facebook brackets practices for synthesizing the contextualizing