Public Intimacy and Collective Solidarity

Scholarship on media events has rarely considered how interpersonal interactions between participants mobilize collective feelings of solidarity. By studying Israel’s popular “Big Brother” television program, Prof. Danny Kaplan and Yoni Kupper demonstrated how some of the structural-interactive features of the reality show encourage viewers to shift from the position of bystanders to the position of confidants and companions of the contestants. “Big Brother” differs from other reality shows in that it has no defined mission other than to beat all other competitors. Participants are encouraged to have social interactions, “to talk for the sake of talking.”

The shift was analyzed by the researchers through the lens of mediated “public intimacy.” Public intimacy takes place when conversations, which are supposed to be in private, are screened to a third party - the audience. In “Big Brother” this situation takes place when the cameras record “spontaneous” events between the competitors, but especially in the “Big Brother” room, which is a kind of confessional booth. In the seemingly closed room, the contestant “pours his/her heart out” to the “Big Brother” and also to the audience watching at home, while the rest of the contestants are excluded from the event. The immediate sense of a collective partnership influences daily public interactions between viewers on social media.

The researchers concluded that the public staging of social interactions in front of a third party (i.e. the audience) is what serves to reaffirm the sense of collective solidarity. The partnership to disclose their innermost feelings and the sense of intimate connection mediates between the centralized media event (TV show) and distributed interactions that take place on social networks.

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