#Love island uk commentator tv

345), a central theme of academic discussion has been the extent to which this form of entertainment truly offers realism and authenticity ( Biressi and Nunn, 2005 Hall, 2009 Hill, 2014).

#Love island uk commentator tv

With most commentators agreeing that Reality TV has “moved from the margins of television culture to its core” ( Orbe, 2008, p. In the past two decades, considerable scholarly analysis has reviewed the growth and proliferation of different forms of Reality TV ( Nabi, 2007 Andrejevic, 2008). Examples of such behavior during Love Island 2018 hint at a paradigm shift in the relationship between television producers and audiences and demonstrate the new pathways available to audiences as they seek to answer the perennial question of this entertainment genre: how real is Reality TV? These fan communities have harnessed the connective powers of social media to pool together their means and knowledge and to eventually exercise modes of sousveillance designed to hold “powerful” actors to account for perceived wrongdoing on the show. This paper argues that while this strategy has enabled Love Island to successfully exploit monetization opportunities, it has simultaneously created opportunities for the show's audience to group together online and form communities of resistance which have placed themselves in opposition to the show's producers. Love Island 2018 has pushed the boundaries of this participatory culture by exploiting new forms of digital media in order to encourage multi-platform consumption of content by the show's fans. Thanks to the ongoing rise of social media, fans of popular entertainment programmes continue to be engaged in new and innovative ways across a number of platforms as part of an ever-expanding interactive economy. This paper explores the changing nature of audience participation and active viewership in the context of Reality TV. Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.